Retro Thing

Kickstart A 3/4 Scale Arcade Machine Project!

My wife gets nervous whenever I mention arcade cabinets or pinball machines. It's an understandable sentiment, because a good friend of mine has a basement filled with over two dozen vintage machines. She knows that as soon as one sneaks through the door, more will undoubtedly follow.

Archie Jones faced a similar problem a couple of years ago. He wanted to build a multi-game arcade unit, but his wife didn't want a refrigerator-sized machine lurking in the corner. The result is the American Ace Arcade—a scaled-down arcade machine that stands just over 4 feet high. It's the perfect height for kids or seated adults.

The design looks absolutely beautiful and Archie just rolled out an affordable Kickstarter project for anyone interested in getting their hands on one. Pledging $40 gets you a set of plans, blueprints and full-sized templates to make cutting side panels a breeze.

If you're not quite so into DIY, a $300 pledge gets you a cabinet kit that assembles with only a screwdriver, and you can add a $150 pre-drilled control panel (USB arcade controller, sanwa joystick and happ buttons) and accessory kit (marquee lights, t-molding, plexiglass and marquee retainers). There's also a $250 personalized artwork option which gets you the side panel art, marquee and control panel overlay.

Once you have the cabinet assembled, what goes inside is up to you. You'll need to supply your own monitor, sound system and game board (PC-based MAME arcade emulator, JAMMA multi-game, or even a home game console).

The fit and finish of the American Ace Arcade looks first rate and it's an excellent alternative to buying a pre-built unit, which can easily cost several thousand dollars. The compact size makes it easy to accomodate in the corner of a family room and makes it absolutely irresistable to kids. And if you like the compact cabinet but want something that adults can play standing, it should be easy to build a small pedestal to raise the unit.

So what are you waiting for? Check out Archie's American Ace Arcade and let me know what you think!

Links:
American Ace Arcade Kickstarter
A Flickr set of American Ace photos
Build A 'MAME Brain' For Under $150

IKEA Helps Store Your Records In Style

I've joked many times that collecting records qualifies as a "lifestyle choice". Once you're bitten by the vinyl bug, you'll find yourself scouring the bins at collector shops, scanning the tables at flea markets, and sorting through boxes at the thrift to find your next treasure. It doesn't take long for the records to start stacking up and needing a home of their own. When LPs were more of a mainstay, there were plenty of storage choices out there, but these days its often specialized and very expensive.

That's what makes IKEA's Expedit shelving system a godsend for those of us who have too many records. The biggest one costs in the range of $200, and is perfect for holding thousands of records. Once I'd discovered this for myself, I started sharing the word and found that many of my other record collector friends found the same solution. I've had mine for close to ten years without a hint of sag (you can even see mine in the background of episodes of Retro Thing TV). So there is a whole network of DJs and vinyl fans who have made the trek to their local IKEA (or Amazon) to find a home for their LPs.

A clever Kickstarter project just secured the funding to create a set of front doors for the Expedit that would also display your favorite LP art. I'm totally on board as it's not only stylish, but it's easy to change the whole look of the unit with a whim. Though because it's a small run, it looks like it won't be able to match IKEAs usual economy for these sorts of things i.e. it's not going to be IKEA-level cheap. Looks like we're talking $35 per door.

Even more, I'd also really like IKEA to get on something like this custom DJ booth a friend turned me on to.

Let's make it happen, IKEA - I hereby dub this fantastic contrivance the Expedit 360!

links:

No Ikea nearby? Order your Expedit from Amazon.
Kickstarter project to create LP fronted doors

Build An Organ - Radio Shack Style

It's interesting when you thumb through a family's photos from the 60's and 70's, and find an inordinate number depicting the folks gathered around the organ. That's outside my own family experience, but I've seen it often enough that it's not an uncommon image. I guess before there was a TV in every room, you might spend an evening around the electronic organ having a sing-along.

I'm surprised at how long the organ store stayed open in my local mall. I remember a vast shag carpeted showroom that steadfastly sold organs into the early 80s. Who was buying these relics back then? Of course when much more versatile synthesizers and low-priced Casio type keyboards hit the market, there just wasn't a place anymore for the ol' Kimball Swingster, was there? Maybe that's where the family sing-along went too...

If you want to recapture that retro organ spirit, but don't want to give up the floor space or your back muscles, maybe you can find one of these old Radio Shack Electronic Organ Kits. It's from their Science Fair Line from the 70s or so, so this organ is a sort of cousin to the 150-in-1 kits so many of us grew up with. Sharp eyed Retro Thingers may notice that the "keys" in this kit are the same morse code levers that Radio Shack has been packing into kits since forever. A dedicated evening of squinting at instructions and looping some wiring will get you a weedy sounding monophonic organ with built-in speaker.

I hope you're not interested in playing any sharps or flats - unless you're a Radio Shack Science Fair modder! I also hope you don't expect much more than a vague buzzing sound - though with all the circuitry right there out in the open, maybe you can add in a few bits and bobs of your own to get the much favored Hammond B3 sound. Uh huh... Or get really crazy and add MIDI - use it as a controller for your MeeBLIP synth! Don't forget that the kit builds into a nice wooden case that you can stain and finish to add that classy touch. Imagine this organ kit as the centerpiece of your living room when your family crowds around the little guy to sing hits like "Camptown Races" and "On Top Of Old Smokey" from the included booklet.

related:
Those 60's living rooms had chord organs too
An organ made of clear Lucite
Another Radio Shack classic - the Minimus speaker

Super Mario Bros. in 64 Pixels

Super Pixel Bros., the brainchild of Brad Slattery, is a reduction of the classic Nintendo game into its pure blocky essence. A reimagining of the original "Super Mario Bros.," Super Pixel Bros. boils down all the characters, blocks and other bits of the scrolling Mushroom Kingdom world into an 8-pixel-by-8-pixel handheld. Mario is a single pixel, as are the enemies and the projectiles you can fire.

"The game shares some similarities with the original, you just need to use your imagination since all the characters are represented by a single pixel," Brad writes. His version has 20 levels, based on the originals, and even includes boss fights. (Your single-pixel hero has to jump on his single-pixel nemesis a certain number of times before hitting the ground.)

He is working on plans to sell the PCB boards, which combined with off-the-shelf parts and his open source code would be enough to build the game. (A custom case might be fun to design yourself.) He also is working on a possible full-kit version. Either way, this is probably less of a beginner DIY electronic project, since it relies on tiny surface-mount components.

Still, with the challenging gameplay and the ability to make new levels, anyone willing to take it on could be in for some long-term fun.

[via Hack a Day]

Build Your Own LED Watch

There was a time in the early 1970s when an LED watch would set you back about $2000. These days, they're considered geeky anachronisms. And what could be geekier than building your own?

Spikenzie Labs recently sent us one of their Solder : Time LED watch kits [$29.95]. It comes as an easy-to-assemble circuit board kit with a case made from four sheets of laser-cut acrylic. You'll need basic soldering skills to assemble the kit. If you're comfortable soldering a couple of ICs, you won't have any trouble putting everything together in about 20 minutes. A fully assembled version is available for $39.95 if you're not the DIY type.

All of the resistors and capacitors are identical values, so it's hard to go wrong. Just make sure you install the ICs correctly -- they're mounted with the markings upside-down. The only tricky part of the board assembly is attaching the battery holder. It's a surface-mount part, which means you'll have to come up with a clever way to hold it in place while soldering it (Spikenzie recommends tape, which is what I used).

Once the board is built, you'll have to assemble a multi-layer acrylic sandwich to form the case. There's nothing particularly difficult here. It's just a matter of making sure that each layer is aligned properly and the control switch doesn't bind. When everything is where it should be, hand-tighten the screws into the pre-tapped holes and attach the "one size fits all" velcro strap.

Tap the button on the right to display the time. It shuts off after a few seconds to conserve the CR2032 battery, and the company estimates it'll last up to five years with moderate use. There's a jumper on the bottom of the board to set the Solder : Time into "always on" mode for use as a desk clock, although you'll need an external power source.

Programming the watch is utterly simple, too. Tap the control button twice and hold it down to advance the time. My only gripe is that the watch only displays 12 hour time. It would be nice to have a jumper that forces it into 24 hour mode, just in case the wearer is unsure whether it's morning or evening. But that's a minor complaint.

Spikenzie Labs has a hit on their hands with this quirky timepiece. It's affordable, fun to build and a guaranteed conversation starter. My rating? Five out of five retrorockets.

Visit the official Solder : Time page for full details and a peek at the online assembly guide.

The Death of the Tower PC?

I last reinstalled Windows XP on my aging home-built PC in late 2009, vowing it would be the last time. The writing was on the wall, and a golden age of affordable and powerful ultra-notebooks and tablets was just around the corner.

Almost three years later, my PC is still limping along. I gave it some RAM and a spiffy new hard drive for Christmas in 2009, but it is increasingly showing its age. The time haa come to find a replacement, and I was suddenly determined to step firmly into the 21st century by leaving my hulking desktop behind.

Driven by news of a much more powerful Mac Mini, I found myself surfing the Apple site late one night last week. It was an odd experience -- I love Apple's machines for many reasons, but a grumpy little voice in the back of my head kept throwing up some very good reasons not buy one.

For example, the $599 base Mac Mini includes a poky 5200 RPM notebook hard drive and the graphics capabilities of an etch-a-sketch. To compensate, I opted for a slightly faster processor, an extra 2GB of memory, a faster (and slightly larger) hard drive and a Radeon HD 6630M discrete video chip that is roughly equivalent to a $50 entry-level desktop video card.

And then it hit me -- I was on the verge of paying $949 for a tiny desktop PC built out of notebook parts.

The Mac Mini is ingeniously designed and runs a brilliant OS, but the idea of paying a premium for a notebook computer without a screen is absolutely daft. You might as well just plunk down an extra couple of hundred dollars and get a MacBook Air or Pro -- most of the key pieces are there already.

I did what online marketers dread most and abandoned my shopping cart right in the middle of the Apple Store's virtual checkout line.

I was suddenly determined to build a shiny new mid-tower PC. Now, I'm fully aware that we live in the "post PC" era, but my netbook and iPad are good enough to keep me connected when I'm out and about.

I don't need portability or a mini PC carved out of a solid block of aluminum in my home office. I just need a reasonably powerful machine that I can tinker with and upgrade myself. Even in the 21st century, it's still the best way to balance performance, price and future upgradeability. Maybe Apple will get my money next time.

So, am I completely out of my mind? How many of you keep a desktop at home for tinkering and gaming?

Lego Super 8 Movie Projector

Friedemann Wachsmuth's Lego Technic projector is fully functional, and everything is Lego except for the lens, reels and lamp.

He says, "The projector uses just two engines and is fully featured with automatic feeding, 24 fps, fast rewind and 120m reel capability. A decent LED flashlight makes it pretty amazingly bright."

Check out the video for some brilliant shots of this plastic masterpiece in action. Friedemann has since improved the film pulldown mechanism to stabilize the image, but even in these shots it's an impressive achievement. I can't wait for a 35 mm version!

Lego Technic Super-8 Movie Projector

Build Your Own AM/FM Radio

There has been a fantastic resurgence in DIY over the past decade, driven in part by the emergence of thriving online communities and magazines such as Make. The coolest thing about making stuff is that once you've made or restored one thing, you find yourself moving on to bigger, better and cooler projects.

However, you need to find the perfect project to get started. If it's too simple, you'll lose interest. Too difficult and you're likely to fling a wrench into the crooked turbine blades of your half-finished stealth hovercraft.

That's why I love electronic kits like this Elenco AM/FM radio. It's been on the market for over 20 years, but that doesn't make it any less cool. The circuit board is cleverly laid out with the parts installed on top of a silk-screened schematic -- a great way to tie theory and practice together. Even if you don't understand precisely how it all works, you'll learn a far bit about the various stages of a superhet radio receiver.

The Elenco AM/FM radio kit is available from Amazon for $30.57. There's also a simpler AM-only version for $17.69.

An Enduring, Versatile Little Chip

I don't think much about the innards of my electronic gadgets. The components — the integrated circuits and such — might as well be magic beans. But the more I read about the 555 timer, the more awe-inspiring the little nugget becomes. Invented four decades ago by Hans Camenzind (and, amazingly, never patented), he estimates about 1 billion 555 chips are produced per year. You can buy one retail for about a quarter.

And what do you get for 25 cents?

If you know what you're doing, you get a versatile oscillator and timer that can be tuned very simply. People smarter than me turn them into buzzers, timers, alarms, metronomes, switches and lamp flashers. Some vintage personal computers used 555 variants for joystick controllers. One Instructable suggests the enterprising hobbyist could use one to simulate a heartbeat for a very realistic fake blood-squirting special effect.

Most people have encountered dozens of 555s in their lives and didn't even know they were there. Camenzind himself told the Transistor Museum for an oral history: "Several spacecraft have them. And, many, many toys. That’s the range."

Forrest M. Mims III wrote an entire book about the 555 and used a pair of them in what is now called the Atari Punk Console, arguably one of the world's simplest analog synths and a hoot of an electronics project for beginners. (There are kits. Go buy one, build it and then fight with your housemates about who gets to play with it.)

Forty years in, the little chip is still stoking the fires of inspiration. A couple of 555 fans recently unveiled a contest centered around it. The slogan: "You've got eight pins … and one shot." Awards will be given to electronics designers who use it in both artistic endeavors and utlitarian ones, and also for the most elegant designs and the most overly complicated ones. Judges will include Mims and Camenzind.

The contest stands to be a testament to this litle chip's enduring versatility. I can't wait to see the winners.

DIY: Cardboard Tube Radio Kit

Matias E. writes, "I found an item from Germany which I think might be of interest. It's a battery driven shortwave tube radio kit which can be assembled in just a couple of hours. I have built one and it works surprisingly well, even with an antenna of just 5 meters length (usually not really enough), I was able to receive broadcasts [in Finland - Ed.] from as far as China, India and the Middle East in good quality.

The kit costs about 49 euros (I found mine for a bit less) and it contains all necessary parts (except batteries) including chassis (made of laminated cardboard, remotely looking like wood) to build the radio. The receiver part of the radio uses a 6J1 tube, which is an equivalent of the European EF95, but for the amplifier section, they have used an IC instead of a tube, which of course some purists might consider to be a compromise, but otherwise an output transformer would have been necessary and it also might have been difficult to get the radio to run solely on batteries, 4 AA cells to heat the filament and an additional 9V battery in series to create an anode voltage of 15 Volts."

Get Your hands on a Franzis tube radio  [instructions available in Dutch and German]

Scratch-Built 8-bit Retro Computer

We featured Matt Sarnoff's Terminalscope earlier this year. Now he's back with a complete system.

He writes: "I've designed my own 8-bit computer, using the somewhat obscure Motorola 6809 processor, wired it all up by hand, and wrote the operating system, drivers, and the rest of the software, all in assembly language. It runs at a blazing 2 MHz, has a spacious 512KB of RAM, and can read files and run programs from a CompactFlash card. So far, user interaction is through a serial cable connected to a PC.

Now that's not too bad, but I also went ahead and added vintage sound and video chips I bought on eBay. I stuck in a TMS9918A video chip (used in the ColecoVision, TI-99/4a, and more) and a YM2149 sound chip (used in the Atari ST, the ZX Spectrum, etc.) I've written a chiptune player and a couple graphical demos; my next steps are to actually write some games, and eventually get it hooked up to the internet..."

Matt documented the Ultim809 build with a flickr set and a series of YouTube videos. Visit the Ultim809 page for all the details.

The Steadichicken

The Steadicam stabilizer was created by Oscar-winner Garrett Brown, who used it to capture scenes in Rocky, Return of the Jedi and dozens of other films. This, on the other hand, is a chicken with a camera strapped to its head. It is neither steady nor Oscar-worthy. [via Engadget]

Everything you should know about Garrett Brown
Everything you should know about chickens

Hackvision DIY Retro Game Console

Hackvision is a tiny 8-bit video game console based on an Atmega 328 microcontroller (of Arduino fame) capable of driving an NTSC or PAL TV at 136 x 96 pixels in glorious monochrome. The entire system is the size of control pad and comes preloaded with Space Invaders and Pong. There's even an online guide to writing your own games using the Arduino TVout library.

The platform supports Wii nunchuk, Super NES and paddle controllers and all unused microcontroller pins are available for expansion. It's even configured to save high scores in the microcontroller's eeprom when powered off. To top everything off, it's an open source project with Eagle PC board layout files and source code available for download and modding.

My only complaint is the lack of color output. It wouldn't take much to add an R2R DAC. Still, it's definitely worth $37.95 ($47.95 fully assembled).

Hackvision: The tiny, hackable, Arduino-based video game system

A Very Curious Vespa

Tony Rabassa writes, "Take a look at this link that I stumbled on. This seems like a labor of love from a hell of a craftsman."

Yes, indeed. You're admiring the world's first Vespa Woody. This beautiful machine was crafted in Portugal by Carlos Alberto, who christened it Daniela in honor of his daughter. His website captures the intricate build process in painstaking detail -- it's unnerving to see the gracious curves of a Vespa frame carved from precious little more than laminated hardwood. For once, I am speechless. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Visit Carpintaria Carlos Alberto for more pics.

The Shrinking Pressman's Hat

The decay of the newspaper business is causing a lot of handwringing within the industry, but its slow-speed demise risks taking with it a notable artifact: the pressman's hat.

Many workers in print shops used to wear these stylish boxy getups to keep the ink and dust and whatnot out of their hair. They are made from sheets of broadsheet newspaper pages that are folded origami-like. You can find some great examples in this excellent set of photos that were taken over the years in the L.A. Times' pressroom.

The printing business is a lot cleaner than it used to be, and the pressman's hat actually gave way to the baseball cap long ago. But even disregarding the shrinking popularity of newspapers, the paper hat is an endangered species because of the shrinking size of the physical newspaper. Broadsheet newspapers used to be legitimately broad. U.S. broadsheet pages were once 15 inches wide, but have shrunk to 12 inches over the last decade or so, making the full spread 6 inches narrower. (Narrower pages means lower paper costs.)

So, grab a newspaper while you still can. A Google search can help you turn up various tutorials on how to fold it into a few hats. (There's probably some irony in that last sentence.) There's one here and another here. As a proud maker/owner of a brand-new pressman's hat, I can say that good paper is helpful. My hometown paper prints its four-page Sunday comics section on nice heavy stock. Otherwise, two full sheets of paper might be better.