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.

The arcade bug bit me once more. To be honest it came as a total surprise. While sitting at cAos workshop, which is stuffed with all kinds of electronics, I noticed a tiny TV set. This would be a great screen for a tiny cab, I thought and cAos said that I can have it, “but it is only monochrome”. Puhh, arcade games with no colors are only half the experience or even less. After another beer it struck me: Pong! I took the little thing with me and the same night – although quite drunk – I searched the net for a suitable pong hardware. Mainly ther were two possibilities: go with a “pong on a chip” that was build in the eighties, after pong got big and that is basically the heart of all the pong consoles that were released by countless manufacturers. This would have meant to go the full way of building a pcb as the chip requieres a fair amount of switches and stuff around it.
The other option was to go with an arduino version of it – I still had an UNO lying around. A quick search on google revealed that there are some ports and a TVout lib. The next day I got the missing parts and an hour of soldering and flashing later the familiar screen came to live on the telly.
Here’s a short video of it.

Starting with a scaled down version of the original cab using Forex (gator board) I had some time to wait on matrlerials and spent it with research on how the pong cab looks.

On Youtube I tripped over those tiny cabs and fell in love with them right away.

Victor has done an extremly good job and using an old gba sp keeps down the coasts per unit. However the cabs do all look the same and only distinguish themselves by the artwork. To cut it short: I sat out to build such a tiny Donkey Kong machine, but with the right, scaled down dims of the original cab sticking to the original shape. Here you can see the prototype being put together.

For the final version I plan to cut the parts with a professional milling machine. Hacking the GBA is next. So far I had bad luck and only got AGS-001 models of ebay that sport the far infireior backlight, which is very dark, but for the prototype it will probably be just fine.

Links
Arduino Pong by Pete Lamonica
Arduino TVOut Lib

This weekend it was retro time. The last month had been something of a no-time-for-anytging-fun period… even our game experienced no update at all. Recent happenings over in Japan are the biggest reason for us not to cary on at the moment…. we are not quite sure how things will be in the future an how and when we release the game.

So I was more than happy to dip m head into the past, took two of my best colectibles from the basement and went to visit the old school brigade. I paid a short visit to the previous HomeCon to find out that there are a lot of people collecting old hardware, building new add-ons, living up to the old times. I felt instantly at home (hence the name) so I was really looking forward to see the guys again.

The event was set to start at 10am. When I got there at 11 a.m. the room was full and if it wasn’t for Mug, who piled up his Amigas and provided me some space, I would have to set up my stuff on the toilet.

After setting up my Atari Video Music, I took a first look around. Noticeable things where a FM Towns II and a carMarty, two Vectrexes, some tabletops and tons of modified Amigas, Ataris and C64s. Foremost I have to mention Ankabantas C64 with imtegrated headphone amp, reset- and hardreset button, multirom switchboard, multicolor LED (pulsing through all spectrum colors) and a milliom things more I can’t recall. The other “object” was SailorSats Mother of all Amigas, as he called it. I didn’t notice for half the party It took me almost the whole party to notice that in his Amiga 500 was an PC running windows. He created some small routines that made windows look and feel like the real thing; he even vonverted the two topaz fonts….. Absolutly insane. Hopefully we will see a release as themepack, along with all essential scripts the scripts.

Some impressions…

After a long and uncomfotable night on the ground, most of the visitors were gone. I enjoyed the silence and started setting up my soldering gun. Two hours later I had hacked a wiimote to hook up a real joystick and arcade buttons. Since I first saw the iCade at thinkgeek.com and got frustrated by trying to order one right away, just to find out that it was an aprils fool, I had the idea of building one myself. Meanwhile you can order the real iCade and Atari is on the line with license some hits from their backcatalog, but I was kinda scared off. So hacking this wiimote was the first step and two hours, because I really had no sleep at all and had to things over and over again. After all you can see a little proof of concept, that it basically works, although the directions are rotated the wrong way. If it wasn’t for Muggy helping me with the voltmeter and stuff, this would probably would have all gone up in smoke. Thanks, man!

One thing that gave my geekines factor a major boost was when I provided two old Zaccaria cabs for our office. The guy I bought’em asked a friend who owned him a favour to bring the two babies to our office. Little did I know that he had no clue what he was delivering: put on their sides on the back of the truck with no fixture at all they both had big scratches over their sideart. This was at the beginning of 2003 and half a year later I had setup the one with generic star sideart using an old 400mhz pc, an ipac, and a 17″ vga-screen, as I couldn’t get the original Hantarex tube to work under dosmame.

Last year in september I spent some time to renew the setup: the old pc was replaced by a xbox running the same special hacked version of CoinOps that enables vertical screensetup that already worked on my Hellomat at home and a redesigned theme to fit the outer appearence (not quite content with the outcome and so I will have to rework this).

A hacked controller that actually took me two attempts to get it right replaced good old iPac. Now I am struggling to find a working vgabios to get frozen cable to work properly with the newly build in LCD; at the moment I still use Frostys VGA bootdisc to get a proper picture.

Some time ago I started to vectorize the sideart which is quite a hillarious job, as it consist of some million stars, coloured with offset print pattern from the early eighties. Rebuilding those took me some time to figure, but I got quite close to the original.

In short: the baby is back, alive and kicking, but needs some makeup and optomization.

Today was slightly frustrating. Actually I intended to use a LED driven, optical mouse. From my last years test with the trackball I knew that it could work, if I just place a LED mouse aside the flywheel so that it could “read” the spinning, but it was not excact. Playing Arkanoid had never been such a pain. The control is jumpy and absolutely unbearable.

Next day at work, I sat down and build a couple of decoderstips and wheels but with no nominal success. I couldn’t get past the first level of Arkanoid. Fiddling about the input settings did get me nowhere. I had to do it the usual way, with a decoder wheel and a ball driven mouse.

BYOAC has some nice tutorials on how to build a spinner. I already  had a smooth running bearing form an old harddrive, so DHansens Stupidity Spinner came in handy. I unscrewed the bearing and made additionals holes in my alu plate. Now the whole thing sits on the downside of the plate and laps perfect. Tomorrow I will go to the hardware store and get some nuts and bolts that I miss. Let’s see if it will all match up in the end.

I decided to keep my Hellomat vertical. Arcade has to be that way! To add a little something extra I will replace one button with a spinner. In order not to cut new holes in my sacred CPO, I made a little aluminum plate that would be held in place by the joystick and the remaining button. It all fits very well.

Found this knop in an old Telefunken receiver that I pealed out of our rubbish dump at work. Luckily there where two and the one for tuning in stations had a big, massive flywheel on its back – perfect for a good spinner.

First thing I always do when building things is that I try to imagine how the new part will blend with the original. I made a couple designs for the button top, as it is fairly scratched. I used “id plate labels” from Avery (No. 6013), but the print is lacking colors and time will show how long it will last. For the first test, they are just fine.

Pictures for you:

Looks really nice – I like it a lot, but it did not spin very well. The original mount form the receiver was riveted and I had to be a little brute to get it out. Now it is unusable. I got new flat ball-bearings from the local hardware store and it now turns smooth and runs like forever.

Next will be the mousehack…

To be honest: This is nothing new. I have my good, old Hellomat for about 11 years by now and haven’t played much. I obtained it back in 1997, where internet was something new in germany. A search on fireball (or was it yahoo? What was hot before google?) revealed very few information about arcade cabs. A couple of friends of mine helped me to get things started.

From a motley collection of sources I gathered all the parts to build a mame cab. A 120mhz pc, 80mb hd, 128mb ram, a hacked keyboard and 2 button joystick made my day. We even managed to get the monitor hooked up to a TVGenie – an seemingly ancient TV card. Along with ArcadeOS and about 2 days of configuration my cab was ready to go. A couple of month later the pc crashed at random stages and I lost interest in fixing it… till now. Working on the DANs sign for my arcade corner I thought it would be good to have a running cab in it, before putting up the decoration.

Through the years, the color layers on the marquee have cured and started to come off. I sat down and traced the whole thing in Illustrator, in order to preserve it. Kind of tricky as one of the layers is vacuum-metalized mirror coating – hence, all colors where applied separately, layer by layer. Last was a white backlit material, that is now responsible for the decay.

To cut a long story short. You can get the result of my work from here >localarcade.com
As you can see above, I did a MAME version for myself, trying to suite the design and create a mame logo the fits. I like it, but my selfmade maquee will never look as good, as the original because of the mirroreffect. Maybe there’s a way to print on a mirror…. I will need to call my printshop.

Well, I just googled around till I found a picture of Flynn’s sign in action. Mhhh… it looks like it uses up to 5 neon tubes in a row on one letter. I was going to use three. On the other hand when I study the pic from shazammy it looks more like three, but the sign is aproximately 26 years old, hence those missing tubes may have fallen off.

Anyway, I will stick with my 3 lines of EL wire per letter. I made a little mock up that shows my wireingscheme. For the inner part I will go with yellow and the outlines will be red or orange, if I can get it. White is by far too hard.

While the orange coating I gave my letters is drying you can check out some nice resource of the movie:

The building where Flynn’s scenes where taken, down in Curver City/LA , nowadays.

The location on google maps.

Tron Sector is THE resource if you are looking for information about Tron:

Tronguy... well, look for yourself.

enjoy…

Yesterday I stumbled across the Flynn’s Arcade sign at flickr. Shazammy seems to be the one who found it and lucky me he took a good, detailed picture of it. I instantly started thinking about how to redo it for my little arcade corner at home.

Today I sat down and made the lettering. First I tried to take some fonts and tinkered around with Illustrators offset path function, but in the end it all looked crappy. Fonts are never symetric and so I found myself with uneven spread of the three colors. I ended up drawing all letters by myself. I used the line function to do so and when I was through I copied the path three times over another and gave it different stroke thickness. Done with that, I outlined the strokes. Last step on this part was to cut off unwanted curves and corners on top and bottom of the letters that appear when using thick strokes. Done. A little printout to see how it will look like in real.

I just returned from the basement, where I carbon copied the letters to a foamboard and cut them out. Quite nice, though cut freehand with a crapy padsaw. I will use those letters to test the wirering and the look before I do them over again… next time with colors aplied and better cut.

On the pic you can see the plot along with all calculations for wirering and the cut out letters.

For the light itself, I was thinking about getting some EL-wires. Those are quite cheap, easy to handle and low on power consumption. Believe it or not: I will need 220cm (2.2m!) of wire to get all letters once. although the final dims of the sing is around 50x22cm! The original Flynn’s got 3 strips each letter. For the colors I go for red or white (original) for the outline and yellow for center. This should give it an authentic touch and the wire is bon marché.

First of all, sorry for all those who posted comments and didn’t get them online. WPs notification didn’t work and I haven’t checked the comments as I was more or less used to write for my own. The failure was simple to get by: wordpress sends out emails using wordpress@yourblogdomain.xyz and so I had to log into my providers c-panel and generate this wordpress@ adress. Now it should work and I should get an email when you leave a comment.

Weather is picking up, summer seems to hit germany and I feel my batteries recharging. I am solarpowered, you know. I was working on the other sidepanel of my minicade lately and wanted to show the progress. I will add logos of old computer systems on the bottom line, just as I did on the left side. I am not sure what to write…. Computers? Systems? Homerarcade? Any sugestions?

Next is the font style… I am thniking of something from the 80s, early 90s… something like Speedball or more like Storm Across Europe. The quality of the used covers is far from perfect. In the end I will need to brush up the resolution. Keep your fingers crossed.