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...