Restoring the 2600 collection - one box at a time

I've been buying carts for my 2600 to increase my library lately...  However as expected over the years, most carts end up becoming loose and without boxes, manuals, etc.  While I don't mind that, for a collector, it would be great if there was some way to get those missing boxes and at least display those loose carts in all their original off-the-shelf glory...

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Fixing a sticky stick...

As you may have seen in a previous post on the blog, I bought an old Atari 2600 a while back. It came with two sticks.  One looked in better condition then the other, however while it may have looked better, it was actually a lot worse then it looked in terms of play-ability.

After a few rounds of River Raid, I found having to push extremely heavily to get a reaction out of the game indicated that perhaps the contacts in the joystick had worn down...  With these old devices, its basically a set of little metal 'clickers' (best description I can think, though I'm sure there's an official name for them) that push down and make contact in a circuit - and when these lose their conductivity - well, that's when you die in River Raid, more times then you would like to!

So - I decided that perhaps one way to make sure I show everybody my true River Raid expertise would be to fix up those unreliable contacts...  And what better way could there be then replacing tired old technology with modern micro switches.

Cheap as chips

I went ahead and ordered some micro-switches from Aliexpress.  They cost US$1.15 (free shipping) for a bag of 50.  Locally here in NZ, these can sell for NZ$0.50 each, so I definitely made a better choice spending my dollar and a half.

2-pin 6 x 6 x 5mm switches

Technically I only needed about 5, but you can never have too many spares - which was lucky, as I did run into 2-3 duds...

Opening it up

The Atari stick is a real doddle to open up - just 4 screws in the bottom.  The only thing to watch out for was a small spring that sat below the fire button, but other then that its just a collection of plastic bits and nothing overly technical to worry about - especially when it comes to that "Heck!  How do I put this back together!?" moment.

Nice and simple...  No crazy "springs-go-everywhere" panic here!

The 2600 Vader model I believe was released in NZ around 1984-ish, making these around 32 years old.  It was covered in dust, worn plastic and the plastic coating on the PCB was bubbling in places.  What I needed to do was to lift the 5 metal clickers from the PCB...  Like most joysticks of this era, these are usually held down with a plastic tape/adhesive cover - and in this case, the whole board was covered in one big sticky sheet.

32 year old dust...  Ewww!

With some careful craft-knife action, and a finger-nail I did pull away a lot of the plastic.  I needed to ensure that I had plenty of track to solder my switches on as well.

Lifting the clickers - a little cut-n-scratching...

A little methylated spirits and cotton bud action, it was looking pretty clean and ready for the switches.

Looks brand new - well, kinda

Switched on

It wasn't as easy to get these switches on as I'd first thought.  Each switch is pretty tiny and I needed to make sure that the switches sat over that central point where the pad had been.  Also, the legs needed to be bent about to match the tracks.

Holding buttons down on a smooth circuit board is tricky - they slip and slide about a little more then I'd liked.  I could have glued them down first, but I didn't want to do that should I need to replace out one later on.  It took a handful of 'finger pressing' and careful maneuvering of a hot soldering iron to prevent melting my skin off as I soldered each one in place.

Soldered on - ready to play... Almost!

Did it work?

As I attached each individual switch, I felt I should really make sure that the switch works before carrying on to the next.  I had an old app on my Samsung Tablet for testing gamepad diagnostics.  There are plenty of tools for this - do a simple search on the Google play website - and its handy for such a project.

I'd also just bought a 9-pin to USB adapter so I could use my old joysticks with my RPi games (retroPie) so hooking that in to the tablet let me see when a switch was pressed...  It cost about $15 (free shipping) from Aliexpress and came with a pretty nifty USB adapter on the end.  This saved me having to dig out my OTG cable...

Very cool USB adapter lets me use this on both Tablet and Pi!

I did run across a couple of switches that didn't appear to work, and one that operated as though it was always on, and pressing down made it go off.

Since I'd actually tested these switches with a multi-meter prior to soldering them in, I'm not sure why that's the case, though some I had held down when soldering. My only real guess here is that possibly the heat, combined with the depressed button could have caused damage to the switch...  But it wasn't hard to just grab another!  (Given there were 50 of them).

Almost done

I finally managed to solder all of them in.  They sent appropriate on-off as expected through the tablet and I started to reconstruct the joystick.  However there were a few things that I had to do before this would work.

These had to be surgically removed.

The main one were the pins on the joystick shaft that were designed to press down on the contacts. The original pads were around a millimeter high, but these new switches were 5 mm (about the same length as these pins).  That mean't I had to cut those off - in fact, I had to make sure that they were 100% flat - even a small amount of plastic was too much.  But it worked.

The fire button was the same.  I had to remove the pin in the center completely.  I also had to remove the spring which let it bounce back up, though this wasn't an issue given that the micro-switch has its own spring loaded button.

And lastly - the switches had to be pretty accurate in where they sat on the PCB.  I found the down switch was just slightly off, and that meant the joystick shaft was on one side of the button rather then directly above it.  The space was pretty small, but just enough to not press down on the switch properly.  A little heat and a tap with a screw driver and it was fixed.

Done!

I managed to reassemble the stick.  Moving it around has a nice click to it and feels great.  If anything, down sounds like it may be not quite returning back to center, but its not hard to fix later.  I'm thinking if necessary, I might buy some fairly small springs (or remove some from a couple of ball-point pens) to sit around each switch just for the extra 'bounce' but we'll see how she goes with River Raid.

It seemed to work with the tablet testing software.  The real test will be with the 2600 when I get back to work (where its sat for a while, occassionally being pulled out after work)

Next time...

In hindsight, I should have gotten smaller 1.5mm high buttons rather then the larger 5 mm ones that I did.  That would have meant no need to cut back the plastic on the stick, but definitely will consider those for the next joystick project...

Roll on River Raid!  Woo!

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Learning technical stuff from books can be fun...

Usborne books were a great childhood favorite when it came to pretty much anything.  They were filled with cool drawings and the way they visually showed how things worked was a great way to teach all kinds of fascinating stuff for kids (and adults for that matter).

When it came to computing, they were a great resource to coming to grips with all that new technology!

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Let Python be with you... Always...

What do you call acquiring  a new Atari 2600?  Well, how about an excuse to recreate a classic console Star Wars game in Python - both riding on the current Star Wars hype, as well as getting that retro-nerd fix at the same time.

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800 bits - 27 days later...

I've made it 27 days so far - and I have to say I impress even myself in just how many small CG projects I've managed to pull out of my hat so far.  I thought its worth a short catch up on some of the things that I've done/used/etc to get me this far.

Before I do, I felt its worth also mentioning a fairly amusing comment I got from someone who spotted my work online.  They thought I'd been posting up photographs - and said that I should really make them look 'less real and more 3D' otherwise nobody would realise I was creating 3D images...

Its not often I will hear someone tell me that they think it looks too real and ask me to make it look more computer generated.  Too funny, but I know where they were coming from on an artistic direction.

"This is too real... Make it less real so its obvious that its fake"

Its all in the software

For this challenge I decided to use LightWave rather then Maya.  Originally I thought it could be a great challenge to pull this off with Maya (having taught Maya exclusively for the last 4 or so years) but knowing the amount of time that some areas of Maya's workflow take was enough to warrant going back to my roots (as it were).

There are also some tools and features that are just not found in Maya, and these would allow me to get what I wanted at the quality I wanted with the tight time frames of a daily project.

What took the most time?

In the last few images, a series of isometric-styled computer hardware renders, production time and rendering can be done in 1 to 1.5 hours.  That's because they are comprised of simplified iconic models with basic colour textures.

However for the first 20 or so, an average of 3 hours was normal with some of the more complex ones taking up to 5.  These I attempted to go for a more complex realistic visual, which is why the time was so vastly different to the more recent projects.

In general, my gut feeling is usually 10% modeling and 90% everything else.  In this case, modeling objects was more around 15%.  Where the most effort seemed to go was on the composition, lighting and rendering.  Surfacing didn't take as long (with fairly low amount of Photoshop effort required - but more about that later) for most things, however the amount of additional tweaking I would do while rendering was where this would increase.

Hmmm, deciding on an angle...  Tricky...

It takes a surprisingly long time to get that shot just right, and often the shot I had originally envisaged didn't look as great on screen once it was rendered - which meant a lot of adjusting and testing.  However this is the area where LightWave really shined...

Don't over-model...

The tip of the day - just model what you see in shot.  For instance in the first image I produced of a ZX81 I never modeled any of the sockets or insets of the machine because they weren't seen - and I simply positioned the cables to sit in the correct locations.

Another example here is a BBC computer where the image rendered was of the BBC logo in the top-right corner.  Did I need to model every key?  Nup...

Model what's seen, not what you think you might see...

Bumps, bumps, bumps...

A lot of 80's computers were built with plastics, and as we know, not all plastic surfaces are smooth and shiny.  This is where adding bumps to the surface helps break up the surface and simulates the appearance of these types of materials - and I can honestly say that I did this with literally every project (given just how much plastic was involved obviously)

It may be tiny, but its essential to getting the look

As I said, this wasn't as time consuming as the cinematographic aspect of each project.  One reason being that I made use of a lot of procedurals for adding extra texture to plastics and other types of surfaces through their bump channels.

Bumps, bumps and more bumps...

I also took advantage of LightWave's gradients to assist in controlling some of these to behave the way I needed them.

Using a slope-driven gradient let me produce smooth edged keys on the BBC

Cameras

To pull off some shots, many of the scenes were fudged.  That is, elements are moved, scaled and rotated to suit the shot and assist in making effects like fogs and depth of field behave the way that you need them to.  Its pretty common in CG to 'work to the camera' with anything - its often the only way to pull off many shots.

Tiny tapes, HUGE TV set, fish eye lens and fog to haze it out in the distance

I also took advantage of a Photoreal camera type that allowed me to apply a lens profile to the render to generate a true fish-eye effect.  While that effect can be faked with Photoshop, you won't get quite the same result as a camera that sees the scene around it by processing the render through a lens.

Depth of field can also be viewed in real time (and very quickly) in the viewport, and that assisted a lot in fine tuning the final effect.

DOF preview in real time helped a LOT in getting the shot

Themes

I knew I wanted interesting interesting ways to display items, and while camera angles and various rendering styles are one thing, I figured I'd also try playing with how to interpret the ideas.  One in particular was when I wanted to produce something to represent the arcade game Dig Dug.  Originally I'd thought all the video game related artwork would be sprites built from 3D cubes (which can look cool) but in this instance I decided to try something different.

We'd been talking at work about post-it artwork just the day before this piece was done. In the last building we were, I'd drawn up some Defender sprites on the windows with post-it notes...  And I figured why not replicate that same idea in 3D.  Then I thought a glass window or office may be a little ambitious - so I went with what we do at work often - producing display boards and hanging the work from thin nylon...  Well, virtually that is.

Virtual art exhibition, anybody?

This was built from about 5 variations of post-it note (ie. a divided plane and a variety of bends) model and by placing them a little imperfectly with some random rotation I managed to get something that looks a little more human.

Lighting and Rendering

Along with surfacing, one of the key features that LightWave has is its Viewport Rendering - or VPR for short.  This feature alone is worth its weight in gold, providing real-time rendered feedback as you adjust and move elements about in shot.  When I was surfacing I used this a lot to see the result of tweaks to bump maps, reflections and node-based materials.  As its a render, it also allowed me to preview my fish-eye camera, as well as depth of field and adjust as I needed.

New Style

All that photo-real style work does take a lot of effort in modeling, surfacing and rendering.  So, I decided after 20 days had passed I would swap my style and try something new and different to keep the work interesting...  I also wanted to see if I could make things faster to create.

A whole new style

For the next set of images, I went for an isometric-angled simplified design - creating machines I recall from my youth (and mostly the ones I wanted, not the ones I owned) in their iconic form and giving them a simple shading style.

Advantages here - I didn't have to worry about fine detail modeling, as I was after the shape and form of the machine and not an accurate model.  Keyboards could be simple blocks, icons and branding didn't have to be added to the model...  Though I decided to model the branding and place it next to the machine.

Taking a break from detail modeling and rendering for a while

The shading was all done by driving the surface luminosity (or incandescence in other applications) through a mix of occlusion shader and a gradient ramp driven by the surface slope to allow shading of curved surfaces.  The floor was a flat plane and simply used a radial gradient to create a 'spot light' style effect from the center.

That meant no need for lighting, calculating shadows - which then made render times a little faster to boot.

So yeh...

There's still 70+ days to go - its a fun project, though at times it feels like it overwhelms everything else around me when I know I have to complete something that night.  With work, time is tight so I squeeze in things when the day is done and I'm sitting in the office...

I'll do another update when I make any new changes in direction...  And obviously a post when I'm complete!  Feel free to check out the project so far HERE.

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The 8-bit childhood returns in glorious CG...

As much as I tried, I hoped to post regularly to this blog...  However after a few weeks, I'm back with another post.

A couple of weeks ago, I'd decided to purchase some cartridges for my old Atari 600XL I've had lying in storage for 15+ years from eBay.  The reason I'd not used the machine at all (yes, 15+ years of storage and about 30 minutes of usage mucking about, eh, 15 years ago) is purely because I didn't have any software for it.

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