Pong, PET and the Donkey K.

With more than three hardware projects on my desk on top of the other things like making and iphone game, an Amiga demo, a game for playpower, trying to get an retro computer museum/exhibition started and a few untechnical real life things it is kinda hard to split my rare spare time up. Progression is slow and so writing this blog eats up even more of the missing time. 😉 Guess you all know what I mean. It seams to be commonplace nowadays that no one has time for nothing and when winter kicks in, everybody burries himself head down in the couch. This year it became even more harder, as our dog and my grandpa died throughout the last month… a lot of death going on.

So I am kind of happy to write this post, to tell you that things can only turn better from here on – not with sometimes stepping back and redoing things.

Yesterday I got my PET 2001 running, with a little helper called PETvet. Michael Hill has done a great job in producing this RAM/ROM replacement board. The static RAMs of the PET are hard to find and use to fail due to their age, so replacing them with newer and more flexible hardware is a good choice.

Here are some pictures of the process

The other project is more arcade related and made a minor progress. I soldered the wires to the GBA SP for the tiny Donkey Kong cab. All works well. Now I put it to rest on my desk, till I made up my mind weather I should build a new cab, CNC cut, or if I should brush up my prototype. Neither have I found proper buttons to look good and be tiny enough, which is more an excuse, as I just did not find the time to search for it. Here’s a picture of the hooked up tiny joystick.

Slowly… very slowly (time passes…. even more time passes…) the mini Pong is comeing together nicely. Not without regrets and regress, as you can see from the pictures. I painted the yellow parts over and over, to get a nice looking finish and while trying to apply the pong logo with using a vinylcut and a cheap permanent marker, it turned to worst. The marker had run beneath the stenciled sticker and looked washed out. With acetone I could scrape down the most of the black color, but I head to repaint it – a good zen-meditational exercise. Now the logo will be a vinyl cut and hopefully stick to the rough finish.

The CPO took some tries as well. The plate itself I cut using a compass saw and grinded down the surface to look like brushed metal. Apllying the text was the harder part. Initally my idea was to vinyl cut and paint it, but the letters are to small to be plotted and so I ordered some sheets of decal material. Man, that felt like beeing 12 years old again, trying to get all the labels on the just finished Tie Fighter Model. Afte a couple of tests I made it and a clear coating finish did the job of preserving it quite well.

More details soon, when the next steps are made.