Kasser DAFM Mega Drive Instruments

I've been meaning to write this post for over a year, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I figured it best to just get something down instead of putting it off any longer.

About a year and a half ago, I picked up a DAFM kit from Kasser Synths. It's a really great kit and an awesome FM synth based on the legendary YM2612 chip, and it supports the ability to load up to 6 custom OPL instruments in DMP format (used by the DefleMask Tracker software).

I wanted to use the instruments from Mega Drive / Genesis games, which required getting the games' music in VGM format and then using the vgm2pre software to convert them to DMP format. There are no pre-compiled linux binaries of that software, and it doesn't like to compile on modern systems without a few tweaks to the Makefile (someone else apparently ran into the same problem and put in a PR to fix it, so be sure to check that out if you run into it, as well), but once that was taken care of it, the program was easily scriptable to hit the entire set all at once. Of course, if you don't want to fool with it, you can just download my full set of instruments here. 

Not all songs have instruments embedded, apparently (hence, some folders are empty; maybe those are using the PSG chip instead? Sonic CD doesn't have any because it's using CD audio, of course). Furthermore, many of the resulting instruments are very similar/redundant, possibly a result of widespread use of the GEMS software for development.

Padhacking a Terrible Genesis 6-button Controller

I recently got a model 1 Sega Genesis and an Everdrive MD and have been playing a lot of the great shmups and arcade ports. The standard 3-button pads are not great, period, but they're especially crummy for those sorts of games (Street Fighter is basically impossible), so I figured I'd seek out some 6-button pads.

Legit 6-button pads from Sega are quite nice, but they're getting more expensive these days (like everything retro, amirite?), so I decided to check out some of the cheap knockoffs. The cheapest ones I could find were going for $8 for 2 pads on eBay and, while I expected them to be shitty, they're worse than I ever imagined:

The Fighting Putt 6B packaging. Both pads I received looked as if they'd been sat upon.

The buttons are so loose I was worried they would fall right out of the cheap plastic casing. The controllers themselves weigh almost nothing and their cord is a measly 3 feet long. The funniest quirk, IMO, is that they only used 4 screws to connect the housing instead of the 5 Sega used, but they put in a fake plastic screw just to keep up appearances:

Very clever, guys. Nobody suspects a thing.

Between the laughably short cord and the awful buttons, I decided to check out the PCB to see if it might be worth putting into an arcade stick (I already have a PS360+ multi-console board, which covers every console I care about except the Genesis/MD, so this would be useful). It turns out that the PCB is actually really great for this purpose, with a common-ground design and nice, big soldering pads for each input:

Here's a shot with wires soldered onto the pads:

And here's one with the solder joints smothered in hot glue for long-term stability:

I hooked it into an existing stick I had lying around and everything works perfectly. After the price of an extension cable, I'm still looking at sub-$10, so not too bad. I wouldn't recommend the Fighting Putt 6Bs for general use, but they're great for padhacking.