Jack Tramiel died yesterday at the age of 83. Besides Jobs and Gates one of the driving forces of the early eighties homecomputer market. His vision of building a coumputer that was affordable and had enough power brought Commodore the C64, that is the most sold home computer of that time. Known for beeing a real tyran when it came down to giving orders and talking to his engineers – the game Jack Attack shows how some of the Commdore Staff was feeling.
Probably such a harsh manner is needed in order to get almost impossible things done. If I recall it right, the engineers only had half a year to build the C64 and under that pressure they made one of the best computers in the world.
Later Tramiel was basically thrown out of Commodore because he seemed to be unbearable to the board – once again a parallel to Steve Jobs. Tramiel was far from giving up. He took over the than struggeling Atari and setting sail to push Commdore out of market, building low priced Ataris.

More Infos and stories about the Tramiels and Commodore can be found “On the Edge”

A great read and a big picture of all the happenings in the Commouniverse and a great insight what could have been if some right decisions would have been made a the right time.

R.I.P. Commod, R.I.P. Jack…

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

… 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!

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.

After toying around with my two roboduinos for some time, I tripped over the camera axe which is a massive tool for triggering cameras via a range of sensors. This thing turned into a professional box and is continuesly updated. As it all started with an arduino I was about to build something similar with one of my boards. About the time I got my first LDR sensor hooked up a friend pointed me to the photoduino project, done by kalanda. I recently ordered one and am half way through with putting it all together. Here are some impressions.

A small test of the 12V piezo buzzer I bought… the force is with me, obviously.

It is winter again and time has passed that quick and lazy me did not find the time nor the muse to update this blog.

Despite Nadine and me visiting Karins place on La Palma once more, I spent a couple of days in Neuruppin. Great site, nice people, bad weather.

On the technical side of life, I got an iPad and together with Simon and Julian – two friends I know from the BreakPoint and Mekka Symposium Parties – we started to work on our game again.

About 5 years ago, we started work on Wings of Fury clone for Mac.
It basically started off again when I met Simon on Skype while I was completly drunk on my annual birthday party. I had to wait till slow itunes had imported the music I wanted to play and so I sent him a short message saying something like: “We need to finish our game on iDevices”.

A few days later we had chat about switching the whole thing from 2D to 3D graphics and a the next weekend Simon presented us a basic version where you could fly around, drop bombs. At the beginning of December the three of us met at my place and worked for almost 3 days straigt and got quite far. The reactions of people we showed the game that far are all very positive. So despite the every year x-mas stress and parties going on I am struggling ditching my head into building 3D planes, probs and stuff for the game. A website will be up very soon too… so hang in there and remember the name “Pacific Showdown”.

Here’s a very early preview of the game – actually the state before our weekend.
Project Zero v03

New York was great. I had the oportunity to join satis&fys nike team to help prepare Rucker Park in Harlem for the forthcomming Nike World Basketball Expo. Sure thing I would go. When I arived in Harlem, the cab driver dropped me off at the west side – Rucker Park is on the east. Walking a couple of blocks with all my stuff and asking people revealed that not many peolple know where Rucker Park is and white man with lot of expensive equipment stroling through Harlem was not a good situation. When I finally got there at noon, I was missing my passport. A quick call at the embassy revealed that my normal Personal Ausweis would last to get me back to Germany. The first day ended at two in the morning with some good beer in Old Amsterdam, a nice little beerbar around the corner from the Beacon Hotel where we had our rooms. At this time I had been up for 26 hours flat.

Throughout the week the daily routine was getting up at 6, head ober to Fairway to get some juice, meet my coleagues at 7 in the lobby, take the metro to Rucker Park and get back ain the evening. My role at the production site was more playing the tourist an documenting things by taking pictures. Friday was dealine an the show was about to start with a big bang: Michael Jordan attended the show along with Wade, Melo and CP3. The whole friday and saturday Basketball teams from all over the world the would play against each other on the official NBA parkett, we set up. A big show! I stayed till about four in the afternoon and than me and Björn went off sightseeing.

Our tour started at the south port as we wanted to visit the old lady with the torch. We just caught a ferrie at Battery Park after we almost took the wrong one to Staten Island. The trip lasted for about an hour and the skyline at dusk was just plain beautiful. Back we walked up, Broadway, passed Ground Zero, went into tons of stores in Soho and had a rather dull pizza at Time Square.

The next day I woke up at four in the morning… jetlag was in full swing and I was just awake. Over to Fairway, got some nuts and went to Central Park. Together with the squirrells I had nuts and witnewsed a bombastic sunset. Green, old trees and above the skyscrapers, reaching into a blue sky, sparkling in the first light off the day. I was contend that I got up and didn’t stay in bed.

On my way back to the hotel, I made a little detour and went into the nearby Apple store. I didn’t have high hopes that I would be able to get an Iphone. You need to have an american address. The folks there told me that it would be no problem to buy an iPhone generally, but they jut don’t have them in stock. I should come back on sunday morning….early! So I came back the next day at 7:30 just to find the line of people reaching already around the corner. Well…. now that I was already here I took my place at the end and after two and a half hours of waiting I had my iPhone. No contract, but an AT&T simlock – for what reason ever without a contract… thanks to Dev Team this was no big problem.

But back to saturday. I was thinking of something in New York that I would have some sort of relation to, something that I realy knew although never beeing in this city before. The Ghostbusters HQ from the movies…. yeah that’s cool and somehow far from the typical sights. A little google search reveald that it must be down on lower east. When I got to the coordinates there where was a parade, lots of firemen. “Great, they can tell me for sure where to find it. This building used to be an ancient firedepartment”. But once again it showed that no one seems to know where things are – I guess the city is just too big to know it all. So, after an hour of searching I sadly dumped the idea and walked all the way up to Fifth Ave, walking through Little Italy, China Town, Soho and when I turned around from the Iron building I noticed that the Empire State Building was just one block away. My feet wre killing me and my back was aching, but after a sneak peek through the door where I saw not much people I opted to hurry up, shoot some pictures and than go the hotel to rest. No chance! When i finally got down again three hours had passed. Standing in lines for the eleveators, walking stairs, been pushed through the store on 80s floor, standing in line again just to find out it was the wrong one, when the doors closed and the lift went up again, instead of down. I was really exhausted and more than dead tha alive when I reached the hotel, but it was worth it. You hardly can grasp the vastness of this city… it is mindblowing. Actually I wanted to go back to Rucker Park that day, in order to shoot more pictures of the event but I was totaly drained…no energy left.

As said at the beginning, it was a great trip. The whole city is so full of contrasts, hughe, packed and so was my time there. One might think that one and a half day is way too short for NY – right – but what you feel right away is that this city is a real world city and that you are welcome. A litle bit like Berlin, but bigger, extremer.

Now here are some pictures of the trip – more you will find over at my photoblog.