Read Only Memory

Custom PC, Issue 205

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Custom PC Issue 205This month’s Hobby Tech column opens with a look at the Raspberry Pi High Quality (HQ) Camera Module, Seeed Studio’s impressively feature-packed Wio Terminal development board, and Read Only Memory’s follow-up to game developer interview collection Britsoft, Japansoft.

First the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Module. The third full revision of the Camera Serial Interface (CSI)-connected low-cost camera add-on for Raspberry Pi and compatible single-board computers – after the original Raspberry Pi Camera Module was replaced with a higher-quality Sony sensor upgrade – the HQ Camera Module is built around a 12.3-megapixel Sony IMX477 sensor, offering increased resolution and improved low-light performance.

The biggest change, though, is that the lens has gone: Instead of a small plastic lens pre-fitted to the sensor, the HQ Camera Module accepts C- and CS-mount lenses – the same type of lens you’d find for security camera sensors. Two lenses make up the official offerings – a 6mm wide-angle and a 16mm telephoto – with third parties selling various alternatives including microscope-style macro lenses.

The Wio Terminal has a sensor of its own, but it’s not a camera: it’s an almost-all-in-one development board built around Microchip’s ATSAMD51 system-on-chip. Packed into a plastic housing with 2.4″ 320×240 colour LCD, the development board includes buttons, joystick, buzzer, LED, light sensor, and an infrared emitter – but, oddly, no battery, which needs to be added using an external accessory which considerably increases the device’s bulk.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Wio Terminal, though, is its general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header: a 40-pin female header, it shares the Raspberry Pi pinout and allows the Wio Terminal to act as a standalone device or to be connected to a Raspberry Pi as a Hardware Attached on Top (HAT)-style accessory – though doing so without some kind of extension cable covers the sensors on the underside.

Finally, Japansoft is a follow-up to the impressive Britsoft which follows exactly the same format: selected bite-sized extracts from interviews with notable game developers, only this time – as the name implies – looking at the Japanese games industry rather than the British. Where Britsoft culled its material from interviews carried out for the 2014 documentary From Bedrooms to Billions, Japansoft isn’t an original publication either: everything within comes from John Szczepaniak’s The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers and is simply reformatted to match the style of Britsoft.

That’s not to say Japansoft isn’t worth reading, but it does mean that anyone who has already seen Szczepaniak’s work will find nothing new. It also makes no effort to fact-check any of the claims within, instead placing a warning that its contents do not represent “a verified factual account” of the history presented.

Custom PC Issue 205 is available now from all good newsagents, supermarkets, and online with global delivery from the official website.

Custom PC, Issue 202

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Custom PC Issue 202This month’s Hobby Tech column opens with a look at the long-delayed but worth-the-wait TBBlue ZX Spectrum Next, moves on to the unique Sega Arcade Pop-Up History from Read Only Memory, and closes on a look at the Raspberry Pi Imager utility.

Issue 202 is not the first time the ZX Spectrum Next, a crowdfunded effort to not only recreate the classic Sinclair machine using modern hardware but to answer the question of what could have been if it weren’t for the microcomputer crash and subsequent sale to Amstrad: the internal hardware was reviewed way back in Issue 176 in the form of the board-only backer reward.

The ZX Spectrum Next is more than just a motherboard, however: its design includes a “toastrack”-inspired chassis and keyboard straight from the drafting board of sadly since-departed former Sinclair industrial designer Rick Dickinson – his last project, it would turn out. The fully-finished hardware, chassis and all, was due to arrive in backers’ hands in January 2018 – but only now, more than two years late, is the hardware finally being delivered.

Thankfully, it’s been worth the wait. Issues with the keyboard’s reliability have been ironed out, errors in the original hardware design resolved, and the firmware which drives the on-board field-programmable gate array (FPGA) updated and tweaked. The 28MHz accelerated mode, missing from the original review, is back, and the custom operating system works smoothly and without issue.

Sega Arcade Pop-Up History is another nostalgia-driven walk down memory lane, but rather than looking at home computers of the 1980s it covers Sega’s “taiken,” or “body sensation,” arcade cabinets – machines which moved to match the on-screen action. The written material is, however, limited: the bulk of the book is given over to card pop-up models of six cabinets, which is a definite first for Hobby Tech.

Finally, the Raspberry Pi Imager. Borrowing shamelessly from Balena’s Etcher, Imager is a tool from the Raspberry Pi Foundation which offers a cross-platform simplified graphical user interface for not only writing disk images to microSD cards but for downloading them too. The flow is just seven or eight clicks long: open Imager, bring up the list of supported operating systems, choose one and confirm, bring up the list of target storage devices and confirm, and flash. There’s even a verification stage, to confirm the image is correctly written – and you can point it at manually-downloaded disk images if your favoured operating system isn’t in the default selection.

All this, and a lot more beside, can be found in Custom PC Issue 202 at all the usual stockists and online from the official website with global delivery.