Still stuck in the 80's - which is a good thing...

"Stick with it".  Its way to easy (specially for myself, and I'm sure many of you others out there) to jump into another project and tell myself "I'll get back to that one later".  Completing a project means making sure that you keep yourself immersed in it and follow it through to completion.

This retro 80's project is just that - and what's helping keep me on track is actually having the machines here next to me, which in turn inspires me to recall that childhood where I started my journey into computing.

So what have I been up to since my last post?  Well, continuation of that asset building to get together materials to produce a final rendered result.  With the cassette and cases all sorted and looking relatively good, a ZX Spectrum computer and some Atari game cartridges already done, its those last few peripherals that I need to load up and play my games that have to be done.

"From Russia...", ahem, I mean cassette to computer, "with love."

Obviously there has to be a way to feed that lovely magnetic data across, and in this case its with mono 3.5mm cables.  While these aren't finalised (textures/materials still need work), I decided to do a quick test render with the cassettes...

You may be wondering what that whole "Bedrooms to billions" tape is about.  Well, its not a game from the 1980's, but an upcoming documentary taking a historical look at the rise of the gaming industry in the United Kingdom where kids (like myself) could be game developers.  Nowadays, not so easy to do with huge studios and billions of dollars floating around...  Apart from perhaps the mobile gaming market, where indie games are still a possibility.  But I digress...

The cables are rigged up with a simple skeleton to allow me to bend, twist and curl them around.  Its important to be fairly flexible (no pun intended) with these assets so that I have options for a final composition...

On the subject of cables, I also made a start on the necessary RF cabling.  Yes, back in the day tuning in a channel on the TV set was the equivalent of a computer monitor.  Obviously being an RF (radio frequency) meant that the computers output would interfere with the neighbours TV reception...

RF plugs - just a little more tweaking to go... and a cable (obviously)

Watch and behold - ahem, that all important TV set

You would be surprised at just how annoying it is to try and find a decent side-on photograph of a small 14 inch television set from the 1980's using a google image search.  In the end I needed to develop my own model sheets for a classic small television through a mixture of reference photo's and some bounding box measurements from articles online for televisions.

"Roll your own" - TV model sheet, that is...

What I did end up producing from a few images was something that looks a little more 1990's then 1980's - however that's not to say that I'd be creating a scene from the 80's - just a scene showing old computer tech being set up...

But lets keep it real

I did find one exceptionally good website while browsing, and for anybody wanting to learn more about obsolete television technology, then the obsolete telly museum blog is a must-read.  I took another look at what televisions of that 1980's era were like, and today just built a whole new TV from scratch.

Once the key elements were noted down (curved CRT tubes, framed screens and the speaker/channel/volume controls on the left side (about 1/5th of the width of the TV casing)) the whole model came together in a couple of hours.

Before we had LCD, LED or Plasma... We had CRT.

Again, like the cables, the TV is still a WIP when it comes to textures and materials - but its one step closer to getting this project to completion...

Just making sure to follow through is the key...

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I'm in the clear!

I thought I'd better test out my cassette case model, as well as make sure I built a folded inlay for future models as not all games had the simpler flat cover...

I threw the front case surface onto the backing for the case to see how it would hold up visually, and I have to say it actually looks better then I'd expected it to.  Often this is where modeling flaws start to show themselves and I was all prepared to switch it back to black if I needed to.

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Just in case...

...a cassette case...  That's the only case we're talking about here.

Since my previous post for "Galactic Abductor", I've now modeled up the case for it as well.  The insert came from an online archive housed at the awesome World of Spectrum site.   The cassette label itself I drew up in Photoshop based on images I found on google.  The hardest part of that cassette label was finding that funky font for the AR - but in the end, daFont delivered one that was almost identical.

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Its a screecher!

Well, its a cassette - that screeches!  Its always interesting to hear young kids claim that they don't believe that computer programs could be stored on an audio cassette...  But in 1983, that's how we did it...  The screeching sound of bits and bytes as they loaded across to the 16 or 48k of memory of the ZX Spectrum...

 I guess the concept of how you can store digital data on an audio device sounds a little wierd - but then again, back in the 80's the whole concept of sending "video" via a telephone to have some kind of visual chat was also a pretty "impossible" to imagine concept.  A phone was for voice - a television was to watch video - and of course to use as a monitor for that home computer...

But look at where we are now.  Its common place to video chat with people, everybodies carrying around a computer in their palm, we communicate with people on a global level every second of every day...  In the 1980's, this was still all "science fiction" material...

Computer games on cassettes?!  Yup... Thats how we rolled back in the 80s.

 

Now, where was I again? Oh yeh, that screeching tape...

I decided to fill in a little time, and expand my assets for my whole 3D "8-bit phase" I'm going through, to model and texture up one of the very first cassette games I got with my ZX Spectrum back in the day...  Galactic Abductors, by Anirog Software.

Another quicky 3D asset.  One of my first ZX Spectrum games

Its a very quick model, created using just the usual generic modeling tools and a few bump maps.  But I'm one more asset closer to getting around to creating and rendering a nice composition...  The plan is to next model the case and inlay and finish this asset off ready for whatever comes next into my head...

Was it the first?  It was one of two that started off my ZX Spectrum experience...  The other being Frenzy, a clone of the classic arcade game Bezerk...

Anyway, enough reminiscing for this blog entry...  Until next time...

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