
At MGC this year, I came into owning yet another Radica device (courtesy of wallydawg)

Well, it was just collecting dust, so I decided to put the sucker to use

SO, I picked me up a couple of 2.5" LCDs off of ebay....and the gutting began...

It was a good thing I picked up two of those screens, as I figured something like this would happen...cracked the LCD when I removed it from the casing (dang they had alotta hot glue holding that in!)

Good thing I found my bottle of alcohol and my q-tips for the 2nd one...got it removed without a hitch and soldered the connections were they needed to go.

The next step...Controller! In the past, I'd just leave it as intact as possible to make for easier soldering and stuff.
Not this time.
I cut that sucker down to the bare minimum.

Next step came the controller portion creation.
I dug out a stack of SMD size tact switches for the buttons. Yeah, they lack the nice squish feeling, but they're about 1/3 as thick 1/2 as long/wide as the regular squish tacts. Keep in mind, we're going for tinyness here lol.
I decided to roll with only a 3 button setup for this controller instead of 6. Why? cause 99% of the genesis library uses only 3 buttons anyway, and also because 3 buttons takes up less space (again, smallness!).

Since I cut the controller's Glop top down to next to nothing, it was an easy fit right behind the ABC/Start buttons board.

For the power source, I'm going with an internal battery supply in the form of a pair of rechargeable 3.6v battery packs. They're basically AAA batteries, so the total supply will be 7.2v and 800mAh. 800 may not be much, but the total draw of the Radica+screen+audio amp is only about 140-50 mAh (depending on game and volume). so even with the small supply it should be good for around 5 hours of operating time

So after about 4 and a half hours of work and a quick battery charge, BENCHTEEEEEEEST!
Success! Was quite surprised it all actually worked on the first try


And that brings us up to date.....with the guts working, I'm now just waiting on additional parts, namely plastic for the case, and a cart connector. However, i'm not 100% on weather or not I wan to do the cart slot attachment considering how much of a hassle it was for me on the Neutron (7 dead Radicas can attest to that fact lol) and also cause the best cart slot I can find for the job isn't cheap either (12 bucks for a compatable card edge connector on digikey is a bit much

So if anyone has a cheap, preferably broken, genesis for sale, let me know lol.
That's it for now. More to come when I get my case plastic sometime (hopefully early) next week.
EDIT: Just got a cart connector for the job........so I guess i'll be doing the danger mod after all lol.