Temporary stop of shipping outside Japan (2025/08/31)

Written by cafealpha no comments
Classified in : PPCenter, Saturn Tags : bullshit, cartridge, homebrew, pseudosaturn
As written in the title, shipping of products made by cafe-alpha corporation is restricted to Japan only.
Reason is explained in detail in a Sega Saturn Shiro article and it's basically because of the recent restrictions regarding postal parcels sent to USA.
Regarding official information from Japan Post, please click on the screenshots below for details.




Technically speaking, it's still possible to send parcels to USA but under restrictions and countries other than USA these restrictions don't affect other countries. However as I don't want to filter the countries and send "Gamer's Cartridge can't be sent to your country, sorry" apologies in the case someone orders a cart to be delivered in USA.

As indicated in the title, this stop is temporary. As soon as the de minimis shitstorm will calm down, I shall resume the orders for international orders.

海外への発送を一時的に停止しています。日本国内はそのまま発送可能ですのでGamer's Cartridgeにご興味がありましたら是非メルカリへどうぞ

Read more Temporary stop of shipping outside Japan (2025/08/31)

PPcenter donation system updated !

Written by cafealpha 4 comments
More than 11 years ago (from winter 2005 ?), I had a "donate" page stating something like "send your money and I will make cool things for Saturn on my free time".

During there 11 years, I received 15 US dollars.

And within theses 15 US dollars, I declined 10 because they were generously donated in exchange of "future help" in making a game for Saturn.

So that's something like 45 cents per year, which is also around 3.8 cents per month. I didn't checked in details, but that should be something like one Skittles per week. Not one bag of Skittles, but one bloody skittles. Per. Week

Fortunately, this era now ends, because I officially announce that I changed my donation system from "send your money and I will make cool things for Saturn on my free time" to "Send everything except money, and I will make cool things for Saturn on my free time. And even if you don't donate anything, I will make cool things for Saturn on my free time anyway."
More details can be found on my donate page

And to make it clear : the motivation to change donation system is not related to money : I just spoke about money received so far in order to write something funny in my blog

I make Saturn things for fun, and not for money. As some examples, I started to design rev2f PCB in hospital room from one week after undergoing cancer surgery, and Virtual Memory Cartridge add-on for Pseudo Saturn Kai was developed and tested during my post surgery chemotherapy. Theses helped a lot to think about something else than medical things during theses times.
I don't say that Kicad and gcc are a cure for cancer (), but theses were very good help however.


And to make it clearer : yes, I sell Saturn cartridges, but no I don't make a living from selling theses. I'm not even sure I produce enough carts in order to pay every-day's breakfast from cartridges sales benefits

Read more PPcenter donation system updated !

No more spam ? "I'll be back" edition

Written by cafealpha 5 comments
Second (and I hope last) part of this article ...

Last week, I spend half a day in getting rid of spam messages via my homepage contact form.
And, it seems to work well

So today, I spent another half a day in getting rid of spam messages via this blog's comments
So I removed bullshit advertisement messages scattered on my blogs comments, and tried captcha plugin for PluXml (= my blog's CMS).
And unfortunately, image based captcha plugin doesn't seem to work well, because it blocks ALL comments ... very efficient spam filter
So I added a simple additional test when posting comments. Hope you will solve it ... or not in the case you are a robot

Extra : I spend the other half a day in testing Saturn cartridge with custom USB dev cart connected to my laptop and Open Logic Sniffer and JTAG (ByteBlaster on my desktop's Parallel Port, because I don't have enough budget to buy a USB Blaster ^^; ) around my Saturn
Here is a snapshot of signals when it finally worked :
data/images/20150417_sniffer.png

Can you guess what it is about ?

Read more No more spam ? "I'll be back" edition

No more spam messages via my contact form ?

Written by cafealpha no comments
Classified in : PPCenter, Mylife Tags : spam, bullshit, etc, php
From last week, I'm receiving many spam messages via my contact form .
I have other things to do than reading and deleting this bullshit, so I added two confirmation fields in the contact form :
 - Email address confirmation.
 - Turing test, not very difficult to solve, but let's see how smart nowadays AIs are

I didn't added captcha, because :
 - It's a waste of time
 - Personally, I sometimes can't solve them
 - It relies on external site and/or waste resources on homepage server side, and I don't like this.

So, dear spambots, I don't thank you for wasting my time in reading your so important messages, and spending half a day in adding security in my mail form. Hope this is the last time I waste my time for you

Read more No more spam messages via my contact form ?

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