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.

I always wanted an Apple //c, since I spotted one, back in our school in the early nineties. A few years ago I got one from a bootsale but it was missing all cables and the power supply, not to mention the driveledge was broken. On eBay I way occasionally bidding on one and last year missed the chance to get one for really cheap, as I told the guy that would only pay a maximum of fifty bugs for an untested computer that was missing all cables again. He put it up on the bay and it ended with a staggering 90€ pricetag. Since than prices seem to have rosen even more.

Last week a //c showed up, along with a bag, monitor with stand and second external 5 1/4″ diskdrive. I got it! Not quite cheap, but with all the extras and this groovy monitor it was okay. The lady I bought it from must have some special deal with the postoffice, as it was here the next day… I never got a big package that fast.

The first thing when unboxing was an evil smell of old cigarette smoke. I could stand it for five minutes, than Nadine came down from the upper level and asked me if I was smoking secretly. The poor little Apple looked the way it smelled. Yellow and black where the primary colours (a fresh Apple //c is almost white) and the first bootattempt showed that the smell seemed to be the minor problem here. The screen went green and was covered with jibberish chars all over. I kept it turned on, while asking google for help. After 10 minutes or so, it came up after I truned it on again. Instead of the “Apple //c”-notice it still kept saying something like “asihj $%”. Every reset showed new effects. Sometimes I ended up in the command prompt, another time it kept pumping out hexdumps…… something was completely wrong. Half an hour later, I managed to load a game but the keyboard was gone. I contacted the lady and we agreed on half the price, leaving me with a computer that was actually intended to look and act like a swan but it was more like a drunken elephant that had spent the whole night under the bar table. Nadine was so kind and handwashed the bag for me (it is still drying in the bathroom) an I started to get the baby back to life.

Took me almost 4 hours to take it appart and clean off the smoke and dirt. I completly drained the keaboard and used a special plasticcleaner, that is refered to as pigpiss by the guys of  For Amusement Only e.V., because it solves all that yellowing caused by smoke. The remains are a yellowish soup that stinks like pig peeeee.

After letting all parts dry and putting it back together the moment of truth came. The first start showed a clean “Apple //c – Check Disk Drive.” and it loaded everything I put into the drive. Great! Testing it with some games the keyboard got stuck again, repeating the last key pressed forever. Google showed me that this seems to be a common problem with the //c and a fix would include bending off a leg of chip on the keyboard…. I didn’t do it and thought to myself that this little treasure is just out of training. Every time I kept it running for some time the symptoms got better and by now it works fine. Apple! Building selfrepairing hardware since 1977.

I was not able to get all the yellowing off, but most of it. The rest is the typical yellowing caused by UV exposure (probably a harder form, mixed with tobacco smoke in my case). Half an hour ago I fixed the Apple II joystick that I got some time ago. Directions where working, but the buttons where dead. Some Spiritus on the switches and we were good to go. Here you can see some pictures and a video of my new lad in action. Besides, playing Choplifter with one hand an filming with the other is a real task.

Next thing to do is replacing the drive port, as the nuts got pulled out by some budbrain and testing and cleaning the external drive. Keep your fingers crossed that it works.

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.

… but a step forward. A couple of years ago – must have been more than ten – I bought an Sinclair QL from ebay. The guy I got it from marked it as defect and still it was quite expensive for me that time. The good thing was burried down in the basement and me tinkering with a lot of old computers lately dug it out and took it to the last HomeCon. Hessi brought his one along with the missing PSU. A quick hookup showed that nothing was working, not even the power LED. Mhhh.. dead on arrival? On Hessis QL the power LED went on, at least. We opened up both computers. My was missing the voltage regulator which was replaced by some strange wire construction that was connected to… mhh… well… nothing. Hessis missed out the video chip – so there was little luck his might send out a signal. We changed parts to and fro and found out that despsite the missing parts and the broken keyboard membrane both our systems seem to work. A short search on the web revealed that RWAP Software had all we needed to get our babies running again.

Today I finally had some time to open up the case and replace the membrane and put a plug to the PSU. Tatataa… QL is alive, in almost all its glory. Mine is missing the lefthand micro drive. I hope Rich from RWAP can help me out once more with this.

Here are some pictures of the membrane swap.

So, Sir Clive… what’s next? I think I will have to figure out how to actually load some software…;)

Well, well, well… where to start off? A lot of things have happened this year. First and foremost: I got married. After almost eleven years Nadine and me took the next step and are really happy.

As planning a party for 100 people is not an everyday task – especially when doing all things by yourself – a lot of time went into this “project”. We had big weeding, along with most of our friends and it really was a beautiful day and everything fell into place. In the end it turned out just perfect and as we wanted it to be.

The next big thing is that Hessi from HomeCon started to work on a concept for a computermuseum…. exactly what I was dreaming off. Reiner from FAO, Rami from CCM jumped in – two clubs, dealing with the same subject. Right before and after our wedding we put together a presentation for some people in the upper reaches of citiy management, to pitch our ideas and hopefully get some room and support. This was really a hard task with its peak at the last weekend, where we had a midsize booth at a local market in Hanau (city where we are trying to actualize our plans). You can find some impressions here. It looks like we providede much fun for the kids and most of the elder generation liked our idea. The timeframe was more than short, though and I did some promotional stuff, like flyer, posters and banners that you can find in the resource section soon.

Today, I finally touched ground and relaxed a little – off course not without pottering about some old computer stuff. I recently got some of my long sought after 8 bit computers from the UK, hence an Oric Atmos and an Acorn Electron. For the latter I found the original joysticks and tape recorder for a bargain price (p&p still is too much). The sticks are in good condition and seem to be very rare. One was missing the label and so I made a replica today. Here are some pics, showing the process.

Sticker Acorn Joystick (set of 3 on an A4 sheet)

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!