Retrospective Retro

(and other stuff from the past)

I’ve been tinkering around with electronic games, vide game consoles, computers and arcade stuff for years. My GCSE technology project was a joystick. Honestly, it was. I got a grade C, which was above average and equivalent to the old CSE pass. It also worked just fine on my Commodore 64. It even had an auto fire circuit.

Any-hoo, I’m going to chose a bunch of old projects and write a quick paragraph or two about them, along with some nice pictures. We all love those, right? If y’all have comments about any particular one (or more) and want me to perhaps update one, bell me up in the comments and I’ll see what I can do…

Pi Spectrum (Pitrum, SpecPi?)

See? It’s just a Spectrum+, but with something FANCY inside.

Actually, it had a Raspberry Pi Zero inside, with a USB sound dongle and an add on USB card with 3 (visible) USB slots. The whole thing is powered via one of the USB slots attached to a power plug, just like a lot of common electronic gadgets nowadays.

This whole project was taken from The Raspberry Pi magazine MagPi issue 67 (HERE) and worked an absolute treat, but the emulator used had a problem that really bugged me. It takes a while to load, as it needs to boot the Pi with some sort of operating system with the usual drivers etc and isn’t ‘instant on’ like the old computers used to be. When I emulate something, I want it as close to the original thing as possible. As it was going to use the original keyboard and case (the donor spectrum is broken, by the way, and I still have the pcb.) Expect to see that spectrum pcb on this very blog one day…

I have only recently changed the insides from this (slightly taken apart when the pic was taken-)

To this -

It now has the Pi Zero replaced with a Pi 2b. A downgrade you might think, but the Pi 2b has onboard sound, whereas the Pi Zero does not and with the new emulator software ZXBareEmulator the Pi Zero was silent. We can’t have a Spectrum without it’s symphonic quality sound can we? (That is obviously a joke). The main thing is, the new software has no operating system and boots IMMEDIATELY into being a Spectrum. This project is now finally finished to a degree that pleases me. Sorted.

Pong Qube

This one was inspired by the very first Pong arcade cabinet. Read about that HERE

I’m not taking about the iconic yellow one that you may have read about or even seen in some of the retro arcades and museums. I’m talking about the red prototype bar top that was placed in a bar in Sunnyvale, CA to test Atari’s new game in 1972.

I made this in 2014! I just saw the timeline on the YouTube video I did on it HERE

It was made with a 5” black & white travel TV and a clone Pong TV clone. I’m not even sure what make it was. There were loads about, back in the 70s and 80s.

I made everything else. Little wooden cabinet, aluminium CNC machined control panel with turned paddle knobs. It worked out really well. So well, in fact, a friend of mine liked it so much I gave it to him. I hope it now sits proudly on a shelf in his arcade room.

Frogger VFD / Arcade Rom Version

As a kid, I had a bunch of VFD games. They were my own personal arcade machines at home. These were made way before most of the cartridge consoles (early 80s) and I loved them.

I had -

• Invader from Space

• Munchman

• Scramble

• Astro Wars

• Ogre Eater

I picked up a very cheap Gakken Frogger in my adult life and then picked up another when I decided to make a proper arcade machine out of the first one. I even donated the working guts from the one I used for the project to someone in New Zealand to repair their broken VFD game. Everyone’s a winner, baby.

EDIT (If you look at the comments on the video you can see the start of our interaction!)

As you may have read in the few blogs I have released, I am a CNC engineer and I like to over engineer things. I don’t like to make excessive work for myself, but with the heavy duty tools I have at my disposal it often ends up that way…

I needed to make a better joystick for the project and so it involved a ball bearing, microswitches and some CNC machined aluminium. I mean, doesn’t everything work better with all that lot thrown at it?

As you can see from the video (below) it consists of a good ol’ Raspberry Pi micro computer and a 3.2” LCD screen. Unlike the Spectrum Pi, I had to use MAME arcade emulation software over a Linux operating system. This has a longer boot time than I’d have liked, but the ever talented Rich Chunksin massively helped me out with the software and interfacing to the controls. His wizardry greatly speeded up boot time and is way better than a normal install of MAME and the usual list of thousands of arcade roms.

Here’s a video from 2017 explaining most of the project. Forgive the video quality, it was a while back and I didn’t have a decent video camera.

VIDEO

OMG. THE HOT GLUE. EVERYWHERE.

If you managed to watch the entire video, you will have heard me say I might make the second unit into a “Turtles” (the 1981 cool arcade game, not the kung fu tortoise junk.) Maybe it’s time???

Thoughts - I would like to get this thing booting instantly, but I don’t think a bare metal MAME exists. It can’t really, as there would have to be different builds for nearly every rom and that would just be silly. However… There are two ways to get an arcade rom of Frogger booting immediately. The actual arcade board, which won’t fit in the smol Gakken Frogger tabletop case and the good ol’ 60 in 1 bootleg boards with just Frogger turned on. I’ll have to look and see if it’ll fit in the base. Maybeeeeeee?