Just a short update on the last two posts. Hessi did a nice Video of some images of the Fix-It-Felix cab, along the way – from creation to the final spot in the cinema. Check it out:

And a littel addition to the iPod post. It was thrown on the dumpster because of the left channel not working at all. Bought a replacement jack/holdbutton combo for 3 euros from some Chinese ebayseller and Thomas just fixed it. NOW, I can hear all the Sids, thanks to Rockbox running on it. Yeahhhhh…

nighty night.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before that most of my spare time goes into the digital retro park project. The basic idea is to do what we can best, namely preserve, talk and repair old hardware and put it into a modern context, show the beginnings and relate to the present. So far we have a strong concept, with lots of nice exponates and talked to a couple of officials in Hanau, Offenbach and Frankfurt, with not much success, to be honest. Non the less, we adhere to our ideas and in the search for a cheap room and potential sponsors, we do promotional stuff now and than. The latest clue can be seen and played at the Cinemaxx cinema in Offenbach right now.

Disney launched nine revamped Donkey Kong cabs, playing Fix-It-Felix Jr., as promotional gag for this years ComicCon. (For those who don’t know who Fix-it-Felix, nor Wreck-It-Ralph is… head over to Disney and take a look.) Soon it became apparent that 9 were far to less and so they build another 50 cabs from scratch. The game itself was coded on a modern Windows plattform, but the cab and all the signs were trimmed to look and feel like it is a real cab from early 80s – even the copyright notice states 1982. We pitched the idea of having a little arcade in the cinema to the Cinemaxx marketing people and they agreed. When the deal was struck, we had about 1,5 weeks left and the following weekend, 1 week prior to the premiere of Wreck-it-Ralph (Ralph reciht’s in German) we had the idea to build a Fix-It-Felix-Cab. Hessi donated his generic cab and so we rebuild the control panel to be as close as the original as possible. Than I sat down and reworked all the graphics needed. RidicRick has done some marvelous work before, but his files were done in Photoshop, hence pixels and so hard to transform and scale. Took me three days and I adjusted some spots that I found being a step off the original and used screenshots and pictures I found on the web. Printing an applying the big stickers was handed over to my colleague Björn, who broke a new record in revamping an old cab. Took him about 20 minutes and everything was on and the cab looked completely different.

Mark from FAO got the task to get the flashgame that Disney put on their website into the cab. This was my biggest concern, to get this falsh stuff running properly. No one on the net seem to have the original game form the promo cabs. Three days prior to our roll-out, we got the game and we were good to go. Mark stuck his head into the code and wrote a loader that would start the game right away, as soon as the PC is turned on. He put in an SLG3000 that adds scanlines and some distortion to the far too clean VGA screen, making it looking like a screen from the old days. Yeahh!

The final assembly was done at FAOs open door day and 2 hours late with visitors putting their heads into our cab, we got it working. That same night, we packed it up, along with Pole Position and Donkey Kong (sadly only in the german cab version) and drove it over to the Cinemaxx. Done with the setup, I replugged the Fix-it-Fleix Jr. Cab and… nothing. By than it was 1.00 a.m. and so we gave up for that day. I gave Mark a help call and on suturday, right before the childerns program straed, we got it working again.

Most kids recognized Fix-It-Felix Jr. but rather played Donkey Kong but that changed after they saw the movie.;)

The official premiere for the rest of us is tomorrow and if you are close to Offenbach and feel like playing a bit, come over!

Here are some pics of the project, showing the process… I can fix it!

Ok, this post should have been out for about two month now and MiniPONG had been on two “Exhibitions” so far. I let you down, my dear fellow readers (are there any?), but sometimes it is more important to get the thing done, than talk or write about it. Right? At least that’s how I tick. Despite that, it still is  a little rough around the edges and I was deliberating wether I should post the picture of the inside, as I already got  some harsh comments on it, but see for yourself.

Facts and production notes:

The whole cabin is made out of Forex© – foamed plastic boards 10mm thick (doubled 5mm) and pasted together with an appropriate glue. Wooden texture was printed on adhesive vinyl and scaled down to fit the dimensions. CPO is handcut 2mm alluminium plate brushed afterwards. Decals are standard waterdecals for RC- and modeling. Some clear film of transparent coating protects the decals from being rubbed off.

On the inside we have an Arduino UNO, hooked up to a 9″ black-white TV, two 10K potis, a pushbutton and some wires. The Arduino is fead with a hacked/adjusted version of Arduino-pong from Pete Lamonica.

At this point a big thanks must go to Björn, for helping me with building the cab, Thomas for fixing the code at some point, where I was once again too stupid to see.
Pete Lamonica for the original Arduino based Pong code. And off course Nolan Bushnell, for kickstarting it all. Thanks guys…

Still there are some things that need to be fixed:

- potentionmeters are logarithmic ones, so when your paddle reaches top or bottom, it gets slowed down
- testscreen showing up when turned on or resetted – needs to be removed
- ball angle needs to be resetted after scroing
- potentiometer for volume on TV is broken, only full throttle or nothing to hear…

Mini PONG had been to some shows:

@HomeCon 16 via Homecon.net – here it was still WIP

@VCFe 20121 via Heise

@VFCe 2012 via Load-Magazin

If you guys are interested in the plans and graphics for that project, drop me a line and I will rework them and put’em online.

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.