More later (need to play!), but gaming under Linux has really come a long way; sure, we don’t have the moral victories of having native ports of very many big ticket games, but it is sure nice to be able to fire up Starcraft 2 or World of Warcraft without a hitch.

Civilization V has come out today and it ran right out of the box (well, from a Steam online purchase anyway); audio, fullscreen or windowed mode and performing well, today is Civ Linux day!

As time is tight, I’ve chosen Crossover Games (a commercially supported Wine) though I imagine the normal Wine could pull it off; The Crossover folks have been good to the Linux community imho so I don’t mind supporting them whatsoever.

A fresh game, with low details and small windowed mode

We’re all gadget nutbars, aren’t we? I’ve been doing mobile development in homebrew, shareware and commercial arenas for 10+ years and can even today build some of my apps for a dozen platforms all in one shot :) Disclosure — yes, I’m one of the guys who spent way too much time on the Pandora… and also the Wiz, the GP2x F100 and F200, the GP32, and you name it, so I think I’m a pretty balanced (pre)reviewer.

Regarding the Caanoo, I’ve been on the fence – it seemed to arrive a little too quick on the heels of the Wiz in my books so I’ve worried there may be some disappointment from the Wiz community; only time will tell if GPH keeps up support for the Wiz (in terms of WiFi and games on their homespun FunGP store) but it is heartening that they have said that “Yes!” they are still behind the Wiz.. but understandably just a bit tired out in launching the new device. Fair enough! Further, with specs rather similar to the Wiz itself, I wasn’t sure if I needed to upgrade or not.

Well, GPH very gratiously sent me a white Caanoo for development (and no, I do not mark something up just because I got a freebie! This is my ‘first impressions’ but rest assurred I will be fair .. buying me out costs a hell of a lot more than a device! GPH if you’re listening – send me a Camaro and we’ll talk!)

Now, my wordy stream of consiousness ‘first impressions’ .. sorry for the length!

Main stuff:

In hand ergonomics and look: Pretty fine, I have to admit; it reminds me of the old GP32 though of course not as bulky or rounded. It feels pretty solid though does have some creek in a few places when you twist it a touch, but nothing to worry about (and quite possibly is a result of the stylus slot.) I liked the Wiz when it came around due to its pocketability and gorgeous screen (compared against the gp2x), but after the device-honeymoon phase I found the small size and tiny d-pads buttons more annoying than beneficial. In the end when I’m commuting I don’t really have down-time (usually driving or with my little one) and so the pocketability isn’t really of value to me. All told, the Caanoo is a much better looking and feeling machine if you can deal with the size. The larger screen and better button placement is all win. To sum — its actually a pretty attractice machine, is solid feeling, and everything seems placed well. It _immediately_ replaced my Wiz. (Disclosure; I got sent a developer Wiz (GPH is _really_ cool in this regard, they’ve been trying very hard to make good with the developer community; this is doubly commendable for reaching out to the English and Spanish homebrew communities.) I also _bought_ a Wiz to show support and get the same specs as everyone else.)

Size: The unit actually fits loosely into a PSP sleeve, so its smaller than the PSP; it should fit into a jeans pocket pretty well, but it is a little large. This is a benefit to me (since I don’t carry gadgets in pocket for the most part), but may be a concern for some; those people can stick with a Wiz. I’d say the size is a win.

Screen: Sure, its no OLED like on the Wiz (what was a goregeous bright little screen we must all admit), but its nice and big and sharp; it doesn’t have the black levels or intensity of the OLED but as a mobile dev I long ago grew accustomed to these sorts of screens and I think most are in a similar boat – but the size and crispness go a long way. (Okay sure, I’m a purist in some regards and collect arcade machines, with their giant 30 year old fuzzy-pixel monitors, so you’d think crispness wouldn’t matter; but in the small mobile space, crispness works really well. The blur in big arcade monitors is great when your pixels are the size of your finger ;) I did notice in some lighting conditions and on-screen colour situations that it was a touch brighter at the bottom than the top, but its barely noticable. Being a TFT (I think?) screen I thought it would actually be a little worse (more like the PDAs of years gone by) but its an excellent screen without too much ’stage bloom’ on one side like most TFTs have. In daylight visibility is not too shabby, which is a traditional weakness of TFT. It is pretty odd that the screen plastic overlaps the display by a little bit, but I suspect this is to cover another traditional TFT oddity — the ‘white band’;
many LCD screens have a bright white single-pixel boarder round the outside – not too annoying really, but odd nonetheless. Either way, the casing covers probably 4 a pixels on each side which is a little much. (Given a large set of the use-cases will be emulation, video and music playing its not a problem — most arcade or home console games focused most activity on the middle of the screen to avoid bezel problems like this, and of course music doesn’t care. Applicatoins may have to compensate however, and your Galaga game will suffer a touch with enemies who deliberately hide in the bezel. So instead of calling it a 320×240 screen you might want to call it a 310×230 and center it :) The screen is a touchscreen and seems as accurate as PDAs of yore as well, unlike the pretty atrocious touchscreen on the F200 and Wiz. I’ve not worked it hard, but it doesn’t seem to have the big dead-regions of those guys. So its a great screen, but it does have some trim.

Joystick: An old rant is that I actually liked the wobbly top heavy GP32 joystick, and really liked the Neo Geo Pocket stick; but its been years since I really used those so I can’t fairly compare. The Caanoo has a joystick and not a d-pad or discus-of-control, and it is clearly superior to the GP2x F100 stick and the really goofy F200-button-pad-thing; the Wiz d-pad was not too mechanically bad, but just too small for my fingers and so just worked out not to be too good. With all of this behind, you can pretty much argue the Caanoo stick is right off the top better than anything GPH has done, and more to point — it turns out to be a fairly accurate controller as well. The material is grippy enough to not have your thumb sliding off and feels good, without sticking too far out. Now, I’ve not looked into the APIs or hardware to know ‘how analog’ it is or if the firmware or apps are mapping to digital ordinals on their own and with what approach etc etc, but with Mame4all (the only app I’ve tried so far as not much is natively available yet) it works out quite well; trying hard-ordinals like Pacman, no problem; trying shmups like Sky Shark / Flying Shark (one of my favourites, and actually the first actual cabinet I bought :) works pretty well though a little diagonally at times; I tried to get a good feel for the stick using Gauntlet (I own two of those cabinets ;) and while a thumb controller can never compare to a real joystick, it works pretty well when trying to line up shots to the creature-spawn points. Now, I suck at playing games, so not being 100% precise is probably a large part my fault (I’m nbever all that precise with dpads either), but this is a good stick, one of the very best mobile controllers I’ve used. (I’ve not really used a NDS enough to say, but I find the PSP d-pad anoying in the first few iterations but pretty good on the PSP-slim (PSP-2000); I’d say this stick is about that good, though a totaly differenyt kind of animal of course.) I’ve not tried the stick in a more purely analog mode, and will have to get to coding before I get a good feel there, but I feel confident in saying — GPH did good here. Controls are a traditional weakness of GPH, and I think they nailed this one pretty well. The stick does have a push-for-button, and its pretty stiff so might be usable; in general I just hate push-me buttons on a stick since I want to whale on the stick and not accidentally press buttons, but this one may be okay (like in an xbox or ps2 controller .. stiff enough you don’t hit it normally, but good in a pinch.) the corresponding d-pad buttons are well placed and well spaced (the opposite of the Wiz), and work well.

Battery: I’ve not measured to see the lifespan, but it seems pretty good; the only point I can make is that it is not designed to be user-removable. I’ve not disssembled yet to know if it in fact _is_ user changable or if its custom and hard to access, but its important to note. I think the PSP did it well where batteries are available on every corner, but most devices have a built-in and unremovable battery, so you can’t fault the Caanoo for it. Still, I prefer otherwise. But its not like the battery will not last as long as you’re using the device (a few years), so not really a concern.

Specs and Utility: It perhaps need to be said, the unit is more or less similar to a Wiz in specs; its sort of a Wiz v 3.0 — larger (a win in my book), with improved interfaces and buttons and the g-sensor and so on, but still more or less a Wiz. Technology is not moving forward too much here, but ergonomics is. This is a game-playing device, really oriented to 8- and 16-bit style of games (witness the emulated games in the FunGP store), and not a general purpose gadget per se. I honestly don’t think it’d make a good book reader due to the low rez of the display (and the built in book reader is really what I’d call a ‘text file reader’ since it doesn’t do any ebook format of note), but as an mp3 player, emu player, etc, it is well designed. Obviously, and especially being Linux based, you can push its limits and go nuts (that _is_ why we’re all here, right?), but I don’t think it’ll really be _fun_ to use as a VNC terminal say. But for your retro gaming and general hacking, it actually seems pretty ideal, what with that screen rez being pretty ideal. I don’t mean to suggest the unit is designed for Linux geeks, it is _very_ accessible for avergae joe.

Boot time: Very fast! I’ll have to check what they did there.. nice :)

Minor stuff:

SD Slot: Good old solid SD slot, and with a port cover (like most ports on the unit, nicely done!); a minor beef is the slot is a little over recessed so hard to push the SD in that list little bit to stick it in place or eject it; not something to concern over.

Power Switch: big and Battlestar Galactica style, I dig it; a big orange switch on the side .. nice and easy to work, no sloppyness. When I saw pics I thought it looked goofy, but in person.. great. On the left side of the unit is a big LED to indicate on or charge state, and and again .. big and BSG style, and awesome. The looks are good.

Headphones: As with most devices, the headphone jack is on the bottom; I wish otherwise, but what can you do? Typical for these kidns of devices.. I don’t know why :)

Shoulders: The ‘trigger’ buttons are mechanically fine, but as with any small handheld, they’ll be positioned in an awkward place; theres nothign a mobile can do about it, so these are pretty good in terms of the mobile space.

Menu and software: its ‘just a menu’, which is to say it works, swooshes nicely and has some animation, but it stays out of the way and gets to the point pretty well, so good enough; I’m not a UI guy (as in, I’m a pretty forgiving guy when it comes to menus and hardware; sometimes I wish I was more picky, but blessedly I’m not!) So the menu seems great. I mostly look at a menu as — its either there, or its bad, so this is good — I don’t notice it, so it did the right job!

Disliked:

The Speakers — this is the achillies heal of the Caanoo. It doesn’t sound too bad, but it does sound a little weird — like sound coming from the next room over down the hall; its obvious the sound is being pointed out the back and sounds a little muffled as a result (especially if your hands accidentally cover the grills, but thats not too much an issue.) A few times I found myself wanting to subconsiously flip the unit over to hear clearer. The sound is crisp in headphones of course, but the speakers facing backwards is just wrong. I appreciate the mechanical realestate challenges, but it has to be said .. the speakers are of good quality, just placed in the wrong spot.

Untested:

I didn’t try the motion sensor or feedback-buzzer.

I didn’t try Wifi since their Wifi-module is not available yet; I must say I find it very distasteful to list the unit as having Wifi (with an asterisk saying an external module is needed) — check the review sites and videos, and you’ll see most of them miss the asterisk and assume the unit actually has Wifi, when _it does not._ Anyway, browsing on the small res screen is not the best thing ever (check your PDAs of yore on 320×320 of 160×160), but it’d be handy for multiplayer gaming or game-ladders, etc. It should be pretty good on the Caanoo as with any Linux device, but its not something they should push in advertising per se. *shrug*

I didn’t try the GPU (or really try to push hard performance. This sort of machine is not designed to be a speed demon, but is instead designed to have the specs good enough and then some for its target of games.)

Final word:

In the end — I thought the Caanoo might have come too soon and not been enough of an upgrade; if you’re tight for cash or pocket space this might still be the case. But I gotta say – given a Caanoo, _I_ would never go back to the Wiz — the larger size is great for me and I really think they’ve got a hit for ergonomics and changes. Its not a giant leap forward, but its definatley the way to go for new buyers or those looking for a change.

As I already have a pile of arcade gear, why am I now bothering with an emu cab? After looking down my nose upon such projects for so long?

A few reasons really; this sort of kit can serve up games ill-suited to the cabinets I have now — consider driving games with steering wheels, for which I have no cabs. Cabs are big, I’m only keeping a couple around :) Another is that you can pack a few games into it and fire them up without switching arcade game PCBs and mucking with wiring, etc.  Thats a heck of a lot of convenience, and also makes it more interesting to ‘just play’ .. wander into the basement, fire it up and go .. no ‘ah shit, need to change which game is in the harness, bah’.

But also, maybe I can stop worrying about collecting PCBs so much; I’ve got quite a few, and a lot of doubles (for parts, say.) I’ve got some original Pacman PCBs .. not just one that is all I need, but a couple spares in case that one rots out. Likewise for Galaxian, Galaga, Donkey Kong, and so on through the classics. Also for ‘pirate boards’ of those (also called ‘copy boards.’ They were common in some towns, such as Toronto .. companies popped up to manufacture clones of real games sold at a fraction of the price; these bootlegs were usually inferior quality, but they ran the games well enough. Oddly, some of them actually improved on the original hardware to get rid of idiosyncracies the real manufacturers built in…) — plus all the rare or weird games I just happen to like, or games that I’d like to wire up someday but don’t have the hardware for, etc. I can reduce the size of my collection without as much risk now, which might be nice.

My cocktail cabinet is a great project machine, I’ve had a lot of fun over the last 10-15 years screwing with it. Someday though I’d like to get a really good condition cabinet that has a big sharp display and looks great, with lots of internal space.. say a Killer Instinct machine, which has nice sideart. This is a cocktail machine, so tight on room, but fits in small places… but its not much to look at. This PC setup inside though could transport to any other JAMMA machine in just minutes .. pull out the belly bits, stick them in another cabinets belly, and good to go. Thats a feature in my mind. (By the same token though, a PC is a heck of a lot more fragile than real gear.. the hard drive could die, and *poof*. Still, most of the hardware should be pretty resilient..)

And its a cool project!

(Ripped from my real Nintendo PCB of course.)

A lot of hacking around on the PC controlled arcade cabinet, but not a lot of time to jot notes down, sorry :) To summarize..

I spent a lot of time trying to get the Intel Atom motherboard (which is a really great little PC foundation .. very inexpensive and performs pretty well), but I just could not get it to sync with my arcade monitor (ancient CRT.) Ancient CRTs are running at 15khz while modern VGA displays talk 31khz (rounding off decimal points.) Modern PC video cards just can’t sync that low, but you can force them or fake it sometimes.. but I just couldn’t get this CRT and this motherboard ot play nice – and at best, you’re not going to get great quality these methods regardless. Sometimes you can get two screenfulls showing on the tube once, but all I could get was one image not half bad, and the other all screwed up all over the place.. _almost_ there, but not quite. (Regardless of fiddlign with h-sync and v-sync on the CRT, etc.) Besides, this wasn’t amping the signal so it was dark colours, too.

Since I got the Atom PCB for essentially nothing (woowoo!) I didn’t picking up a cheap motherboard ($53CDN) and using a CPU I had lieing around, and moved the RAM from the Atom pcb over. Good to go, and this time with a PCI-E slot, meaning I could slide in an ArcadeVGA card. Both the J-PAC and the ArcadeVGA are by Ultimarc .. usually about $50 or so each (so not half bad!), but I got ‘em on the cheap too. It pays off being in the retro circles for .. well, forever :)

ArcadeVGA is a video card that is designed to work with old arcade monitors — it talks 15khz and does really low resolutions no one bothers to support anymore (like 320×200 and all the oddballs you need for Centipede, etc.) It also boosts the signal nicely for colour reproduction. It hosts a DVI port as well, and with a DVI->VGA adapter you can plug it also into a modern PC monitor so you can get a sharp crisp high resolution image (for configuring the PC say), then driving the arcade monitor on the other port. Genius.

J-PAC is a multi-function device that essentially helps you plug your PC into an arcade cabinet (wired for the “JAMMA” arcade specification, which is the most common one.) For instance, joystick and buttons on the cab are reported back to the PC as a USB keyboard, while it routes video back onto the arcade cabinet monitor. For the ideal configuration, you use the ArcadeVGA video card hooked up to the J-PAC, in turn hooked into the JAMMA harness of the arcade cabinet, and you’re 3/4 of the way there.

As such my setup is now.. Asus motherboard with an old Core2Duo CPU and 2GB RAM (”low spec” by todays standards; what good times we live in..), 80GB laptop drive, old PC power supply, J-PAC, ArcadeVGA, and not much else beyond the arcade cabinet.

By the way, you can pick up old used arcade cabinets very cheaply at coin-op auctions. I’ve gotten them for free a few times — the auctioneers just want the unsold units off the lot, or purchasers bought the cabinet for the games inside and just want to ditch the actual cabinet itself, etc. Often a cabinet will be in good shape but the game inside is a real stinker … pick the unit up cheap, toss out the game within and repurpose the cabinet! Fun little hobby, with a bit of woodworking thrown in :)

I have run into a few problems..

- audio; routing the PC audio to the J-PAC or direct to cabinet speakers is a bit of an issue; the cabs are usually mono (occasionally stereo), and feature no amp (most games include it.) As such you’ll need to wire the PC to an amplifier and then into the system, but I’ve decided to just find an old used set of PC speakers (which include amps!).. for now they’re whole and just sitting in the cabinet belly, but I might just take the speakers out of their plastic shell and screw them onto the inside of the cabinet, cutting holes for them to emit through. (ie: Beside the cabinets real JAMMA speakers, so as not to damage the fully functional JAMMA setup it already has.)

- firing up the PC; the menu system I’m using to launch applications/emus/etc is Mala, a pretty handy and flexible tool that renders very nicely to a real arcade monitor… and has options for shutting down the PC — perfect! After doing an hour of Space Invaders or whatever, just joystick down to the Shutdown option and good to go. However, turning _ON_ the PC is goofy .. since I’m not using a PC case, I have no ‘on/off’ switch, and certainly this motherboard has no ‘always on’ BIOS option. “Wake on USB” is only available while in powered ’suspend to ram’ mode. So far as I can see, theres no easy way to have the PC just turn on when it gets plugged in. Right now I just reahc a jumper down and cross the poles where the case’s power switch is wired to… I could add another button to the arcade cab and wire it to the PC in the same fashion, but it seems a little hackish and I don’t want to add an extra button thats only for that purpose… *hmmm*

- Windows displayed all over; during booting, when the Windows logo comes up.. it cheapens the experience; I’ll have to hack out that logo, and find a way to disable the BIOS “Post” screen :)

- Coining up; I’ve configured the J-PAC to map back a ‘chorded key’ as pressing the coiner.. so holdign down Start-Player-1 and one of the other buttons, sends the PC emulator the ‘coin her up’ signal. Handy! Fire up the emu, hit this combination to drop a coin in, and hit Start-Player-1 button to start the game and away I go. To quit the game, hit another chord .. Start-1 and Start-2 at the same time, and bam, right back to Mala. Awesome!

As I mentioned, I’m using Mala Frontend to fire up MAME (or whatever other program I wish to use) and its working out very well.

So far I’ve got the belly of the machine spread out on the floor, but already I can power on the cab, power on the PC and it’ll load up Windows and auto-start Mala, and its good to go.

A lot of finishing touches .. mount the motherboard, PSU etc onto a nice piece of wood or two, so they can be easily slid in and out of the cabinet intestinal cavity; maybe de-gauss the monitor so it doesn’t have dis-colouration patches in a few places, or get a new CRT. All way too much effort ;)

So far, as I already had my heavily modified cabinet in great shape, this has been a pretty easy mod, and very inexpensive all things considered. Even if you’re coming at it from scratch, you only need to go in for a couple hundred _total_, and you’ve got a great retro-junky toy.

Retro means a lot of different things to people at different times; from retro music (”n-20″?), to retro styling (50s style barstools, neon text on signs, vacuum tube clocks…) to of course retro gaming. Back in the mid 90s when I was really getting into arcade collecting as a hobby (unearthing and restoring old arcade games in their original cabinets, among other sordid activities) I was surprised to discover the cross section of people involved. Normally in such pursuits I’d run into fellow geeks, and being geeks we were relatively useless in a lot of ways — machining, woodworking, and so on. But get into retro machine restoration and suddenly you’re finding guys hacking about amps or speakers for 50 year old jukeboxes, people rebuilding the play surface from an old silverball (thats pinball to some), building new cabinets with more features than originally intended (monitors that can rotate 90 degrees to facilitate portrait or landscape viewing for arcade machines.) We’re talking about people into woodworking and lathes, to electronics guys, to glassworkers. Here I was, a 20-something bum learning about how to score and cut plexiglass, where to find T-molding to put fine edges on cut particle board, learning enough electronics to not die while removing or repairing a 30″ CRT television, and so on. Good times for someone who’d grown up doing assembly hacking on 8-but computers. Anyway. (Word to the wise — a CRT lieing around unhooked up on the floor for a few years will absorb charge from the air around it. IT might well have been discharged years ago, but you pick that sucker up and you’re flying across the room. Trust me :)

As anyone whose gotten into this hobby or perhaps any collecting hobby, you quickly find out one truth — the first hit is cheap, you learn a few things, and then you suddenly grow the collection fast. Space becomes an issue, and consider that old arcade games are the size of refrigerators… most people into retro gaming are content with their beloved Atari 2600 console (the woodgrained “heavy sixer”, oh yeah), or their Nintendo Entertainment System (”NES”) console. A rare few of us nutbars want the real machine, the arcade cabinet with their smokey scarred displays and real honest to god joysticks. Rarer still are those who have space and luxury to make a games room, but most of us just settle in for a machine or two and call it a day. For me it was a couple of cocktail cabinets (sitdown units that resemble small tables), and a couple big cabinets.. no silverball space for me. Sure I’d stacked up hundreds of games worth of internal organs for these guys, but only a few cabinets, so swapping games inside the cabinets became second nature, including building wiring harnesses and methods for switching buttons quickly, etc. Rather a pain, but part of the love. I’d throw a barbecue every summer and let people come over and play old classics on free-play across about 5 machines .. good times. Nerdgasm true, but good times nonetheless. I mean, barbecue and beer and Galaga for Crom’s sake!

In the end though, due to limited space and always the desire to hit the middle of convenience versus hardcore awesomeness spectrum, a certain breed of person will decide to make what is often referred to as a ‘MAME cabinet’ (since MAME is probably by far the most popular game emulator, this time for arcade games.) Certainly MAME is not the only thing you could slap in there, but its the big daddy. MAME runs on any halfway modern computer, be it a Mac or Windows box, or a handheld such as the PSP, the GP32, whatever. Any gadget you’re using such as a phone or mobile game console probably has emulators available for it, to assist your running Atari games, text adventures, whatever. I can run down that route another day. The emu’s are easy to get (and fully legal), but the hard part is legally acquiring old game code to run in them .. ripping game code from an old cart is akin to ripping music from a CD, but you need a special device to do the reading.

Myself, as someone whose spent years writing emulators back in the day, both loves them to bits, and also adores the original machines; playing a game on an emulator is great, but playing the real honest game on real honest controls is the way it should be, if you can. Still, going from running an emu on a laptop using cursor keys to the other end of the spectrum of real machines… right nestled in the middle is the emu cab. Sticking essentially a PC into your arcade cabinet (or making a new cabinet with a computer monitor in it etc, just in the form factor of an arcade cabinet) is the way to go. Instead of having to swap wiring and buttons, power supplies and gameboards, you waggle the joystick and pick a different platform and game. But still on real controls. Good times.

So with all that history there for you, as someone hardcore as myself into this stuff, I’ve finally broken down and decided now might be my time to make an emu cab.. I’ve got literally hundreds of games in the basement from Pacman to Joust and so on, all in bits and bobs and parts, and I’ve also built a decent emulation collection .. the hard way; schematics, coding, breaking open carts and reading the game code right out of the bastards. And walked up hill both ways, get off my lawn! Still, it’d take me a couple hours to get Joust up and going in what is currently my Bubble Bobble machine, but if it was an emu instead.. it’d take a few seconds only. (After having set it up first of course, on the hard drive, and all that jazz.) (Costs are also something to be considered, but none of these options are really all that expensive anymore. Ask me and I can write up details of costs for various scenarios.)

Anyway, in case anyone is curious about this particular project, maybe I’ll post the low down.

Of course, things are _Considerably_ easier nowadays than 10 years ago when it was just us rats in the rgvac (rec.games.video.arcade.collecting) Usenet forum. Now there are ready made things you can buy, and ready made home-kit cabinets and controls and such. Retro is _BIG_. It was more fun back 10 or 15 years ago ordering from Happ Controls direct (from a catalog, the same one real arcade operators would have) and getting a box of wires and bits, getting real arcade gear. But now we’re all grown up and yuppies, and someone else buys from Happ and sends you a kit. Still, makes life easier…

I’ve already got arcade cabinets, so my goal is a little different than those wishing to build up a new cabinet from scratch (awesome project guys!); as I want to keep real arcade gear inside the target cabinet, and using my good old 25 or 30 year old Wells Gardner monitor and such, I want to be minimally invasive; I could rip out the ancient CRT and put in a new fresh computer monitor, see, piece of cake.. but I want to stay authentic as can be, while still getting the advantages of a PC inside. Others have produced tools to make this easy.

1) PC motherboard of some sort; we all have dozens lieing around by now, or at least your old used computer shop will have some junkers around; they don’t need to be all that powerful, depending what you wish to run and what you want to plug into it. I’ve gone out on a limb and picked up an Intel Atom based motehrboard with a 1.6GHz chip on it .. you can get these little darlings for $50 used, and not much more new. No kidding! Toss some RAM on there and thats a whole PC with no case, in a 6″ square form factor. Hook on an old laptop hard drive or whatever drive you’ve got lieing around, and maybe install Linux or Windows XP service-pack nothing (no net connection here!) and you’re done, pretty much.

2) The J-PAC pcb is a handy little gadget that takes inputs and outputs with the PC and maps them to the JAMMA edge card specification used by arcade games since around 1987; ie: plug that PC from step 1 into J-PAC and then into the arcade cabinet and you’re 4/5s of the way there. Pretty easy nowadays ins’t it? There are many other options, from other one-pcb gadgets to using a TV-out card on a PC, and so on. (Look up “ArcadeVGA” for an awesome gizmo, too.)  A J-PAC is worth about $60USD new if I recall right.

3) And an OS and frontend; for Windows XP there is MAMEWAH and such, but dozens exist or just setr up your OS to autoboot right into an application that understand the cursor keys for its menus (since J-PAC will map the arcade controls back to cursor keys or other configured keys.)

When parts arrive I’ll find out of the Atom pcb’s Intel GMA video card can manage the 15khz refresh rate needed for old arcade monitors, or if I’ll have to use some crazy driver that fiddles with the cards low level to fake it, or if I have to reply on J-PAC or other tricks to do frame-dropping, but I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.

All told this is really a $100-$150 or so investment in gadgets, so far. Not bad for a first cut. I mean, it could be shaved down over time, and I could re-use an old PC with All-in-Winder TV-out to eliminate that cost right there (hmmm, probably should have ;), but I wanted to go in with a small little kit I coudl mount nicely, and not miss.

In essence, if this works, I’ll be able to run dozens of different emu’s right smack inside my existing arcade machines, with not much work and no fuss, no wreckage of my existing machines.

It’s always the same. You’ll stumble across someone new to a given collecting habit you’re on top of, and you’ll see that spark in their eye — 1) They will be dieing for any and all info to screw you or someone over with, to get a great deal somewhrre, and 2) They’ll dream of opening up a shop or museum, and 3) They’ll go nuts for a year, burn out on it, and then be cool for awhile. In arcade game collectors, it means you’ll drive all over the damned country-side looking in rotted out basements to find games, or go dumpster diving. It means you’ll briefly entertain the idea of opening an arcade, or putting games in coffee shops or retro candy stores.. to amuse people, or to even make a buck (you’re stupid still, see) to buy more games. After awhile, after you’ve acquired a few hundred games, seen the size of the mess, and dealt with your boyfriend/girlfriend’s disgust, you’ll get over it.

But oh, the stories you will have!

Anyway, I posted to a forum (again, over at gp32x) and noted one of my stories. (I have many, btw, I should jot ‘em down.) So here is that post with one of my stories .. when I was an arcade collecting fanatic back in the day.

–

Back when I was first hacking away at arcade emulation (it wasn’t done before), life was hard. A few peopel got stuff out before I did (Neil Bradley got the Atari vector games out, and there was one other lad, I forget right this moment.) I’d done just a couple games (Phoenix and Space Invaders, both very ewasy to emualte.. good first tatrgets since I had the schematics and pcbs handy, anyway.) .. not long later, out popped Williams Arcade Classics/Collection by.. Digital Eclipse I think it was. They’ve continued to pump out emus for all sorts of platforms over the years. For awhile, they bundled roms right in the .exe or in data files, and were trivial to find. Like Bubbles.exe would have the rom embedded in it, and you could just hex search for it and dump it right out. Took 5 minutes (but I knew what to look for.)

Anyway, google away

jeff

For Infocom, they released several ‘big collections’ (under Activision) not too long ago.. say 1999 or early 2000s. The MAsterpiece Collection was one. I have seen it in bargain bins many times. It lacks Hitchhikers Guide, but is a great and cheap one to track down.

Magnetic Scrolls released a few collections too. Level 7 is a right pita to find imho though

We should all share collection stories.. I’ve got a few I should blog down.

Like classic cars.. they go down in value (when not classic), then go up in value when they become classic (ie: the people interested int hem when young, get old, and can now afford them), and then go down again when people lose interest (everyone who wants them, has them), and then go up again as they get ancient (museum show off type pieces.) Likewise with arcade gear .. there was a time when they went up in value nastily, just awhile ago, but are coming down to sensibility these days. But right before they went up, just before ebay came around, you could find them cheap .. the net was around, but most peopel didn’t use it yet, and certainly not arcade operators. There was no ‘book of value’, and no way of finding these guys, and no one selling the pcb’s in stores, and not a lot of collectors around. The usenet rgvac (rec.games.video.arcade.collecting was as good as it got, and it was full of bastards.)

One of the best was when I found an old route runner (guy who ran a dozen arcades in various towns, so he had a ‘route’.) He was retired now and got rid of most of his route, but kept a few running. Most guys like this go to auctions etc to buy money makers, but don’t compete with collectors much.. but you always talk to these guys, since they often have piles of stuff, and their ointerests differ to ours.. so you can find some good buys. Anyway, this guy had a _Barn_ full of gear, and evne a bus full of jukebox parts that he’d let get half submerged in the mud out back. (He’d done well in the 60s, and not cared since.. musician insanity and all Anyway, his barn was full .. the main floor was just empty cabinets, and he took out the pcbs and tossed them up into the hayloft. Once in awhile he’d go up there and organize.. an ‘atari’ pile, and so on. He even put all his vector pcbs into giant baskets and such. You’d think gold mine… but for anyone who knows how barns are made, you’ll know they’re leaky, mossy, moist affairs. So he had literally a thousand or two thousand pcbs, mostly from 1995 and ealier, all rotted to hell. You coudl see the rust and gunk oozing out the back of the barn. *heartbreak* Still, he had hundreds of working pcbs and cabinets from his route, and was always at every auction for coin-op gear (jukeboxes, nbilliards tables, arcade games, mechinical and redemption games etc.) (If you’re a collector, you shoudl eb on top of auctions. Once I got a car, I was drivbng hours in every direction to find these things.) (hell, I used to get old telephone books, find old arcades, and track down the old owners.. who often had garages or storage units full of old gear. I bought out a retired operator once.. $5 canadian per arcade game pcb.. bought about 200 boards from him, some for $1/each, just to clear out his garage. R-Type cabinet for the win!) Anyway, I bought some stuff from this guy.. he was not an idiot as you might think, he just had different interests (making a living, not collecting.) Two great moments..

1) He asked me to name a game, any game, that I had been looking for for years, and he’d probably have it. I mentioned “Quartet”, since I’d been looking for a long tiem.. not super rare, but I just couldn’t find one. He blinked, smiled, twinkle in his eye, and reached behind himself almost without looking, and pulled a Quartet 2 (same game) out of a series of slots in the wall. He showed iit to me, in good condition, and then said “$200 USD”, knowing I wanted it bad. Fucker! So I ended up trading hard for it, some games that made money that I didn’t care so much about, and some he really loved from back in the day (including a Grene Beret.) He ilked me on thatone, but at least I got me a Quartet! (and a Bubble Bobble, woot!)

2) As we were negotiating some of these deals, I Watched a bonfire over his shoulder. Can you imagine, in that bonfire, clearly visible to me, and hurting my soul, was a Space Duel vector machine. *cry* (one of my favourites, as a game with a very interesting mechanic added to the Asteroids style. I also own a Space Duel and Asteroids PCB, I might add, and have them hooked up to the back of a _Vectrex_ to make them playable. I do have an Omega Race cabinet, but its in such hard shape I’m afraid to hack it at all, since I’m really an electronics noob

Anyway, theres some stories for you. (I started collecting about 1995 or so, before the big ebay rush that initially drove prices up, and then bottomed them out again once all the collectors had what they wanted.) When I first started out, prices were not known so you could find either a deal or a ripoff depending what the owner thought, and you could find whacky old steals.. I cleaned out an old arcade repair shop once (not cleaned out, picked up say 50 games), including joysticks, stack of monitors, decals, you name it.. most of this stuff I acquired over the years I sold to get cash to feed the habit for the games I actually wanted. (And then I sold a pile of it, like 150 games or more, to get cash to get married

I posted this in a thread over at gp32x, but as I’ve posted similar things over the last decade (no joke), I thought I should keep it here so I can find it again in the future. Really, Iv’e got so many really good and researched ‘essays’ around in various forums, I should go dig the bloody things up for safe keeping and re-use. Anyway, this post isn’t all that pollished, but it has some good ideas a few of you might care about.

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/48329-legal-emulation-resources/page__view__findpost__p__739366

The first post of that thread lists some good public domain and legal places to get ROMs (ie: homebrew, or big name games that have been authorized for release.) My post is some crazy assed ways of getting ROMs legally.

Copy/pasted here:

You should not forget fair use. There are many ways to obtain ROMs that are legal and yet often forgotten.

The obvious but hard ones are .. if you own original carts or arcade pcbs etc, then dumping the roms. This is really not very hard, but can be costly or difficult to acquitre the originals. ie: For arcade pcbs, you’d need to get the boards, and get an eprom dumper/burner, but the applications to analyze the roms and file them/rename them, etc are easy to come by. Its actually very easy to do, once you have the stuff (But an eprom burner/dumper is $50-$200 depending on features and chips supported.) Dumping carts like an Atari 2600 cart etc is same deal.. get an eprom dumper and away you go. I got a ‘decent’ DOS-based eprom burner years ago that works for any game up to about 1995 or so (give or take), so Iv’e dumped my own arcade pcbs (good for repairing similar pcbs) and carts. Opening carts is a bitch, I might add.
So get on ebay or yard sales and start buying old carts!
Also consider..

If you buy (say) a PC emulator that is legally licensed (there are many.) Or a PSX emu that include sega games. etc. Consider — you could both pull the rom files out of these (often not protected at all), or even just use them for ‘license’ sake. ie: I’m not sure about legality of buying just to get the license but in the end you’re cool (the uploader is breaking the law, but by you ending up owning the file you are entitled to own, you’re cool.), but if you buy a Sega emu from Sega, for PSX (For say $2 in the bargain bin), do you now consider it that you have license to all those games? I know people who went around scooping up all  the PSX and used PC emus they could find, and end up with licenses to _hundreds_ of games for every system they could find… for just a few $$! But myself, I’ve gone and ripped roms right out of such things — I bought the licensed copy, so I bought the roms which is 100% legal.

There are companies who sells roms with license, though they usually go out of business. Star ROMS for awhile was authorized to sell Atari roms for arcade games and some 8-bit games. They were like $5 ea or something, which was a bit much (Esp to me who owns most of the arcade pcbs anyway), but just to get more legal rom licenses, I bought a bunch up. Before they went under :)

Nintendo .. they used to (Still?) sell those cards with NES games printed on them in dot-patterns, and you could use the NES Game Player cart for gameboy (or something?) that would read those cards and let you play the games. Well guess what — the card has the rom on it, and gets you a license.. so you can rip the rom from the card (scan the card and use an app to decode it), or just consider it a license and then go download (again, not clear on the legality there. since really, downloading is usually (but not always) illegal, even if you’re licensed to own the end result.)

Still, buy up those old NES game player rom cards, and rip the roms right out using easyto use software.

Theres dozens of crazy ass techniques like these, so you can legally get roms and licenses damned cheap. Just no one iscreative nymore when you can just go download ‘em :/

On occasion I like to game, as you can imagine from the frequent ramblings on the blog here. I really should comment on more topics, but I’m probably not all that interesting a person to most of my limited audience except with regards to my many insane acts of extreme handheld coding.. anyway, I really didn’t play games for many years (10 or more, aside from the odd game of Civilization.) Mostly I’d be fiddling with a compiler and doing really obscure things, but I blame a compatriot (snoop) for bringing me back into the fold.

Naturally, having a toddler around is the opposite of slack; while it is super cute when she fires up Dance Dance Revolution, mostly I don’t want to wake her up when I’m lobbing grenades around or stealing cars. We can usually get away with watching a bit of TV without waking her up (thank Crom, as House is still queued up in our PVR :) (note to those with small kids, get a gorramned PVR!)

I got to wondering (nay, assuming really) that there would be wireless headphone solutions. In fact, it must be relatively common since solutions were available relatively cheaply and at Best Buy. I didn’t really cast the ned wide, as BB had something, it got good reviews and was not insanely expensive, so I just sauntered over and picked it up one day. And its fantastic.

Enter the Turtle Beach Earforce X3 which are essentially big-donut style headphones with a closed-cup (to limit sound leakage) and a ‘boom mic’ that you can rotate safely out of the way. (Let us be clear here — those wanting wireless headphones are not likely requiring a mic right? Anyway, at least they provide it for those that don’t see the irony.) Cost me I think $80 (normally $100, but a new model – the X4 – is due or already out.) The wireless part is an infrared system — each of the donuts has a little IR receiver on top, so even if you turn your head around it picks up the audio transmission. Naturally you’ll need the IR transmitter which is a teeny little box that you wire inline with your audio, and that conveniently comes with velcro tape should you wish to suspend it somewhere out of the way. After hooking up, it took my slow feeble mind a moment to realize the TV was still making sound and that I had to hit ‘mute’ on the TV remote (I had naively assumed that it would disable audio to the TV when active, but this is fine too.)

There are a few ways to hook it into the media center etc, but I chose to route my XBox to the TV via Component, and this kit includes Y splitters essentially so your audio goes in and comes out in two pipes — one to the IR transmitter, and one to the TV as normal.

It takes mere minutes to set up, and the sound quality is pretty good; certainly good enough to play games with, or even watch a movie on. No headache after hours of this.

You look like a total dork, sure, but I’ll take it if I can watch a loud movie or play a game when I want to :)

I’m starting to get it… the difference between the gaming population segments. Now you may know me – I’m  a wannabe for entertainment that is too much of a busybody to let himself indulge. I really like the atmosphere of the gaming scene, since it sparks on the old demo and hacking and cracking scenes from the old glory days in the late ’80s. I follow a gaming news site (www.kotaku.com if you care) and pretend to know the rules. I want to like sitting down and playing games, but I always find myself drawn elsewhere.. coding, or watching some TV or movies instead.

I think I’ve figured out a piece of it (and ignoring any obvious workaholic mental problems please ;) I _was_ moderately hardcore (in that I was into it big in the 80s during the Age of Infinite Time, and in the sense where I enjoy hard and interesting games), and am certainly _not_ now a casual gamer (said with disdain, and in the sense where I get bored nearly instantly of simple games. Perhaps thats the techy part of my brain trying to analyze and move on..)

The trick is that I nolonger have the time (or perhaps the interest) for really hard games, or really involved games. Firing up Dawn of War 2 and I’m impressed by the first few levels, really fun stuff.. but then just as soon as I can start to see where they’re going to ramp it up a bit, I lose interest. I really really deep in my bones love all that is Civilization, but I don’t have the heart for a game match that takes 10 hours to get through. And I certainly simply cannot stand casual games which have nothing to them.

Perhaps there is a niche for folks like me — grown up gamers, or something. Those of us who wannabe gamers, but simply don’t have the time anymore, and we refuse to fall into the geezer category.

But this is where I’ve found video can excel. There is crap video (American Idle, sorry folks), and excellent video (The Wire, Spaced, Torchwood) , and sugar video (Cleopatra 2525? er, I mean, The Big Bang Theory.) We can watch it more or less at our leisure nowadays, even if we can’t make a theatre anymore. We can pick from a wide library (not as wide as with literature of course) but we’ve reached a time when good is good .. a good movie from 20 years ago can still be good. And more to point — we can set our threshold — we want really gripping, really intense, really long story arcs, or really short sugar coated goofyness .. its there.

And we can watch it.

So we can get interesting and involving, but without real effort. Without experience grinds, without difficulty curves.. yet still good quality stuff.

Hmrf. So, while gaming is taking over and carving a large piece of the living room out for most people, carving it _out_ of the video part of the pie … I’m finding the reverse trend.

Now, if only the game devs would fill my niche.

Wheres my massive multiplayer Civilization? I’ll play a general, someone else collect the taxes.

I’ve always been pretty impressed with the Sony PSP overall; brilliant screen, some good gaming options, music and video playing, and even a crappy yet capable web browser. Still, Sony (like Apple and a million other companies) likes to mess with its customers and so to really get the full value of your purchase you have to ‘unlock’ the device – imagine buying a car that can only fill half a tank of gas except on Fridays, where all you have to do is fiddle with this warranty removing knob to get the full deal. Anyway, planning for a short trip I have been mulling over what gadgetry would be good to bring along.

Ideally I won’t need a gadget at all, but should like some options if I find myself bored with a napping baby. You could try for a micro-laptop such as a ‘netbook’ or UMPC but they tend to be pretty expensive (you’d cry if it were lost, stolen or crushed in transit) and too large for a pocket; a PDA which can excel at internet communications, ebook and multimedia, but tends not to be a solid game machine for long trips; a smartphone, should you wisk to have people bothering you on your vacation. Options options.

Anyway, for a short non-working trip, the things I’d like the option to do are: ebook reading (avoid carrying cumbersome and heavy books), video watching (from video files, not internet streams), some gaming, and idle web browsing. I’m not worried about email or heavy duty activities in this case. (Should you need to do email or document edittig or whatever, then you may want a netbook or whatever.)

Rearding ebooks, I’m not going to go on a tirade about DRM and locked up data and cost versus real hardcover books and so on – I’ve probably ranted about that before. Suffice to say I only use open formats such as RTF and HTML and textfiles; for the PSP there are few book reader options and no time for me to write a new one so I fretted a touch, though I eventually found the most excellent BookR open source app. Because it is not Sony-blessed you’ll need an unlocked PSP (free and legal, if frowned upon by corporate masters.) This is what I meant above — if theres no sensible book reader, they shouldn’t be locking down a perfectly capable device. Likewise with video — the built in video tools only let you watch low res video except for Sony UMD bought videos. Thats just evil in my opinion — artificial limits to encourage you to buy their products.. a clear conflict of interest. Anyway I’ll go on about that later in this post.

There are some really goofy attempts to do things on the level, such as an app that reads ebooks and spits out a million image files (multiple images per book page) and you use the PSP built in picture viewer to ‘read’ the book; you thus don’t get a memory of which page you’ve read to, but it sort of works. BookR is a PDF reader – which provided some reservations up front as most ebooks you get in PDF format are DRM’d to heck – but with PDF now being more or less an open format numerous converters now exist. I used the OpenOffice export-to-PDF option to convert RTF files to PDF, and good to go. I don’t know if the application can render ‘big’ PDFs with charts and embedded crazyness but when it came to various ebooks I’ve bought in unDRMd format or ones I converted myself, it seems to work very well.

Further, with the PSP screen being very high resolution in the landscape orientation (480×272), you can have a full-width comfortable read of most PDFs .. you just have to scroll down the page as you read, no biggy. The application lets you zoom and pan and rotate so you can accomodate most files, but you don’t want to do that when reading. If you’re converting to PDF yourself you can of course just use a larger font and set the page-width should you wish to make the reading easier on the eyes. All told though, I loaded up a half dozen books onto the memstick, and I think I’ll be fine. This is a big one for me, a device-picking deal breaker, so good to know.

For video I thought to bring along some ‘rips’ of DVDs I own and videos I’ve downloaded. Sadly, most gadgets require you to ‘transcode’ a video into a format they can understand. This is pretty annoying, but I appreciate they’re doing the playback via built in hardware and thus conserving battery. Doing video playback purely in software is a battery burner, and can be hard to keep up with the full framerate. (Mind you my older Palm and Windows Mobile devices could do it no problem, suggesting the fine TCPMP Core Codec people did good work.) Anyway, I found a bajillion freeware and open source tools to do the work (such as Universal PSP convert, and PSP Video Converter (pspvc), and others), as well as commercial offerings (from Sony and other third parties.) In the end, the freebie guys tend to work pretty well, and sometimes better. The commercial offerings tend to work easier and have better less cheesie UIs, but also tend to conform to the Sony recommended specs. Sony used to (maybe still does?) require video playback to be lower resolution that the PSP can actually show, to ‘encourage’ consumers to buy UMD videos on disc, which get full resolution playback. This is a dirty dirty maneauver due to conflict of interest for Sony .. selling a PSP, and also selling UMD videos. As I said, its like buying a car with things built in you can see, but are not allowed to use.. but you still pay for them. No way. So you have to unlock your PSP to get full potential – unlock a device you bought – the joy of the tech sector. Still, if you want to buy something that works well, has batch mode and so forth, there is Avex software which can convert to pretty much every device.

For DVD ripping I ended up picking up DVDFab (there is a free trial download as well), though there are dozens of similar products. DVDFab again honours the lower-than-real resolution, but does a pretty nice job of ripping straight from DVD to PSP ready formats. With their mobile option (a bit pricey altogether, but what the hell..) you can select a target device (ipod, PSP, etc) and it knows the appropriate parameters and voodoo.

In the end I carried a mix of videos at full resolution from open source transcoders, and some not-full-res rips from DVD using commercial apps. All told the PSP shows them both very well and the screen is so sharp (PSP original and PSP-2000, I’ve not seen a PSP-3000 in person). Win.

For gaming it is also worthy to unlock your PSP. (See a trend .. unlock for ebooks, unlock for superior video playback, unlock for gaming.) Carrying a pile of purchased games on UMDs is fine (I picked up little 5-pack carry widgets to keep UMDs stored nicely, cheap as dirt), but I prefer tech to lead to simplicity, not complexity. I don’t wear a watch or carry a manpurse, or keep too much crap in my pockets. There are a few tools that ‘rip’ copies of game UMDs onto your memorystick. Usually this is for piracy, but stay clear. (I’m a software dev; I sell my stuff. It pays the bills, kthanks :) Anyway, you can rip your games into raw files or a “.iso” disk image using various tools. Games are pretty big, and some keen folks know about removing unwanted files and so forth, but its a big hastle. In the end, you can pick up 4 gig, 8gig or even 16 gig memory sticks, and put a few games on there pretty easily.

Anyway, I didn’t bother with much of that; what I was interested in was the PSP’s built in PlaystationOne (PSOne, PSX, whathaveyou) emulator. Naturally, just as with Sony’s UMD resolution devilry, made it so the built in emulator is meant to play only specifically authorized PS1 games. On the one hand this is probably because they want to ensure the games play well in the PSP and not give you a bad experience, but its also obviously because they wish to re-sell you games you’ve already bought for a real PS1, and sell PS1 games to people who never had them before — leverage old product for new revenue is bling bling to a company, of course. Still, with an unlocked PSP it is trivial to use open source tools to transform your PS1 “.iso” disc images into files the PSP built in PS1 emulator can use. Again you tread dark waters to get these tools sometimes, but they’re legal and free, just frowned upon by Sony (of course, they just want your money.) Anyway, using a million variations of POPStation you can ready up any of your old PS1 games. I don’t have many, only bought a few of the true classics. but more to point.. I converted Civilization 2.

Sure, in my Atari emulator you can play Civilization 1. But Civilization 2 for PS1 was designed for a handheld controller pad, not a computer keyboard, so works pretty well on the PSP. And I mean, its Civilization 2. A few hundred megabytes ,a fraction of your memstick, and you’ve got Civ in your pocket. Pretty hot.

Naturally, keep a couple good games in there; I keep Lego Indiana Jones in the UMD slot.

All told, the PSP is pretty inexpensive, yet a very capable device. Just you have to unlock it (’mod’ with ‘custom firmware’ or the like) to get half its potential out there. If only Sony would release an official ebook solution.