About
I'm Jeffrey Mays, the person behind Chicagoland Retro Tech. The initials work two ways on purpose — Chicagoland Retro Tech the workshop, Cathode Ray Tubes the things I love to work on.
The work
This is a one-person workshop in the Chicago suburbs that builds hardware for vintage computers and game consoles — Atari, Commodore, Intellivision, MSX, and the adjacent ecosystems that grew up around them. Cartridges, multicarts, ROMs, adapters, EPROM upgrades, test gear. None of it is mass-produced. Everything that ships here is built and bench-tested on real hardware, by hand, by me.
I don't design the PCBs in the catalog. Those come from the open-source retro-hardware community — PlusCart+, A8PicoCart, PiRTO II, FujiNet, and others — and every product page credits the people who actually designed the work. CRT's value-add is sourcing the boards, programming the chips, assembling the units, testing every single one on era-correct hardware, and shipping them to you... ready to use. The community designs the gear; I make sure your specific unit actually works before it goes in the box.
Why this exists
I grew up in the prime 8-bit / golden-age arcade era. High school for me was mid-eighties, and the Atari 800XL was my first computer — the same platform I'm building hardware for now, forty years later. Modding the 1050 disk drive, swapping ROMs, soldering enhancements onto stock boards, attending BBS user-group meetups... it all sounds like a movie, but those were just our weekends — that wasn't a phase, that was the texture of being a teenager in that era for a certain kind of kid.
I lost touch with the hobby for a couple of decades. COVID brought it back — old friends, old computers, eventually the workbench. CRT is the natural continuation of that.
The brand thesis, in one line: I'm not running a museum. I'm making a time machine.
A perfectly restored arcade cabinet is a replica of itself. A worn-but-working cabinet — one that's got the screen burn, the cigarette scars on the control panel, the carved initials in the wood — is a portal. The goal here isn't preservation as artifact. It's putting working gear in the hands of people who'll actually use it the way it was meant to be used.
Chicagoland
The name isn't decorative. Bally, Midway, and Williams — the companies that made most of the cabinets in my arcade room — were all based here. Locally I'm involved with SCAT (Suburban Chicago ATarians, founded the year before I started high school, still going strong), VCF Midwest every fall, and the broader retro-tech communities on AtariAge and Discord. I also host tnfs.chicagolandretrotech.com, the public TNFS server used by the FujiNet community — it's a small thing to contribute, but the community made the platform; the least I can do is help keep the file server lit.
Practical
If you have a question about what fits what, or want me to look something over before you order, email me at support@chicagolandretrotech.com. I answer within two business days. Every order ships from this workshop, US only, within one to two business days. Bench-tested on real hardware before it goes in the box, every single time.
— Jeffrey