Old School Video Games

Collection additions

OSG — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 15:48:10 +0000

Someone posted about an old-school TRS-80 in the box and I decided to check it out. I got it and while talking to him, found out that his neighbor had a collection of atari stuff that she wanted to get rid of so I decided to check it out. Well, it was a huge collection of stuff and not just Atari…

I will need to do an inventory and I will probably do that this weekend. That said, I did manage to take a few pictures and I hope that a few of these will make good blog posts for system and console restorations.

Enjoy

Started working on the spaghetti

OSG — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 15:11:34 +0000

Hello,

So you ever noticed those nice wiring jobs where everything lines up and it looks so clean that you almost believe that it was done without human intervention… well the arcade was not done that way when I originally built it. Because of that, when I decided to add the missing nixie circuit, I decided to also clean up the rat’s nest of wires that was my arcade.

I know I am going to get hell for this but here is what it looked like before.

Yeah, I know. On a good note though, it has been cleaned up a bit and I managed to get some nice new parts to help with wire/cable management. Check it out so far…

I also realized that I never posted what the arcade looks like. Here you go. I will also be linking a few things that I used to help with my cable management so if you want to use any to help, feel free.

Items purchased for arcade:

Cat 5 Cable Clips
Din Rail Terminal Blocks
Din Rail Mount for Pico Board
Din Rail Mount Breakout for Ethernet
Aluminum Din Rails 8″

Got the boards…

OSG — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 14:42:16 +0000

From the previous post, a few things happened since then. First, the board design had to be changed. I realized that this old board design would not fit into the arcade layout and I had to modify the position of things slightly. I had to space out the Nixie tubes 2mm and that cleared a few pathways up so good a trade-off. I included a side-by-side comparison for your pleasure.
We will see how things go when I install it.

New Board

Old Board

From prototype to printed circuit

OSG — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 20:46:55 +0000

Howdy folks, as you can tell from the prototype from the previous post, all the software and hardware setup is complete. the circuit worked many times over and over without any errors. I have only ever made one circuit board and honestly, that was more a showpiece than an actual circuit but this time I decided to read up on a few pages and after searching for a day or two I managed to find two programs that seemed to work well. One was Kicad which was really intuitive and full of features that I might use in the future. The other was Eagle by Autodesk. This program was complicated but had a few tools that made 80% of the process I needed for this project automated. Either one could have been good but I decided to use both as one can import the other and both can export Gerber files which is what I needed to get my board physically made. Here is the rendering of the board.

The Credit buttons are on the sides next to the Nixie tubes so I had to make spaces on each side. There is also the fact that the Nixies are in reverse since I wanted to flush mount the nixie tubes, so I decided to have all the components except them on the other side.
I will get specs for the space and verify that the board will fit in but so far they look good enough to fit in there. Should have this up and running real soon and then another item on the list is taken care of. Enjoy.

Some Progress on the Arcade’s Nixie Credit Counter

OSG — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 14:09:07 +0000

So I started working on the circuit for the Nixie Credit system for my arcade. The idea came when I was designing the arcade and wanted to let the kids/grandkids get the real feel of putting tokens into it. When I installed the system to accept tokens though, I noticed that Mame would not remember how many tokens or credits were in that game if they decided to exit and select another. Having a separate system outside of Mame seemed the best solution and while segment LEDs were nice, I had a few tubes left over from working on a Nixie clock. I felt that this would add a sense of rustic enjoyment and a unique talk piece.

Fast forward a few years and I decided to actually give it a swing. Originally I found a hat for an Audrino but the hat was not ideal as it would give false signals and accept interference that would make it work intermittently. This attempt came with a big change or using the Raspberry Pico which was broader in capabilities as well as gave me wireless capabilities so I can adjust between credit and free play without physically making adjustments.

At this point, I have prototyped the circuit and will be working on getting drawings done to have it printed. Once done, I will add updates here.

Here is a video of the final prototype working. The Youtube channel has more testing videos of various components as they were made. Feel free to check them out as well.

Create and Enjoy

One Step Closer

OSG — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 20:04:30 +0000

We always want to get a good quality video of actual console gameplay but the older you go into the console world, the harder it is to get good clear pictures. Before HDMI, there was VGA/Component, Composite, and RF. RF is connected either by coax cable or before that, a switch box with rabbit ear connectors. It is very hard to get a clear picture and harder to record since both video and audio are on the same connection. At least until now that is, we have just acquired an Ambery RFDM1R Coax A/V agile Demodulator TV tuner. If this sounds a bit like Marvin the martian describing his weapon of choice, we thought that too but this bad boy takes RF coax signals and splits them into Composite signals. Video and 2-channel audio are ready to be recorded and streamed.

If you are looking for one, we included the link and will be adding our first video shortly after setup.

Stay tuned.

Hello world!

OSG — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 14:09:55 +0000

Please pardon our dust while we are under construction.