If you fancy a go on a handful of classic arcade games from directly within your web browser without the hassle of configuring an emulator, go check out Mame-online.
At present, there’s only thirteen games available but even in beta, it’s shaping up to be a really polished Java/web frontend for Mame. I’m liking that the game list uses marques images and were possible even includes the glass bezel graphics during gameplay.
Which game first?….. whatever I choose, I may be here for some time!
Standard Mame keys are used including 5 – coin & 1 – Start
We go up.
I’ll certainly be keeping tabs on this one as it develops and here’s hoping they’ll add even more titles soon….such as Phoenix for example ;-)
Phew, it’s been a hectic few weeks both at work and at home and now that the sun has finally got his best hat on (for a week ) , a good portion of game time has been swapped for gardening time and man-cave swapped for greenhouse. One plant I’m growing for fun this year could be considered a game of sort as when fully ripe and touched in the wrong place, ‘exploding cucumbers’ quite literally explode….and quiet violently too as they throw out their seeds at speed. Missile Command in the greenhouse? What I’m hoping to do is capture some of them on my camera as it has a video mode at super slo-mo 1000 frames per second.
Plans for this (bank) holiday weekend was to spend a little time putting the the final touches together on my MAME arcade cabinet but I’ve had delay this as more importantly, we’ve been out looking for a new car (the last becoming very unreliable and mechanic bills rocketing).
I take delivery of one next week which just in the nick of time really, as I was heading out next weekend for a spot of camping and hiking in Wales and then the weekend afterwards back out west to the the ultra geek-fest retro gaming event of the year Retro Revival. Quite a few friends have been busy these past few months and I think the consensus is, that everyone is looking forward to a huge slice of downtime at Revival with plenty laughs and massive intake of retro gaming.
The lists of attending pinball tables and arcade machines keep growing as do some items of note that I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing before. The list of arcade machines also includes seven colourful Zaccaria cabinets including a Phoenix cab just like my own – accept this one is fully restored. I’m also looking forward to checking out event co-creator Chris’s own Zac cabs including his highly impressive Super Cobra cab like this one.
Game time of late has been a little light and have a stack of titles I want to get through including all of the entries and winners for this years C64 Seuck Compo (i did try the twin stick Spy Rider a few weeks ago which was superb), a couple of Atari 2600, I picked up on eBay as well as thirty Sega MS carts I managed to bag for just £10. Fez came out for PC the other day which is also on the list as well as Sturmwind although this hasn’t arrived yet.
I have, however been looking at early video games from Capsule Computers after reading an article charting the rise of some of the biggest video game producers and am finding there first video game Vulgus to be quiet addictive despite being a little bland.
Any-ho, that me done. I hope, you’ve been getting in more retro gaming than I have and if you happened to be popping a long to Revival, maybe I’ll bump into you over in the Retro Computer Museum area?
Sturmwind for the Sega Dreamcast has finally been release and so with any luck my order should be making it’s merry way to me soon.
What is Sturmwind? Well, it’s an independant, classic arcade shooter written by Duranik for the Dreamcast catering for the league of fans still devoted to Sega’s last console.
Check out the features list –
16 Levels
3 selectable difficulty levels
configurable controls
adjustable screen position
different weapons selectable
more than 20 large bossenemies
hundreds of different enemies
FMV intro sequence
hybrid 2d/3d game engine
resolution 640×480
PAL50, PAL60, NTSC and VGA (with Adapter) compatible
region free
works with any MIL-CD compatible Dreamcast
CDDA Sound
supports: Joypad, Arcade Stick (Analog/Digital), VMU, Rumble Pack (configurable)
internet WEBcode Hiscore Tables
award Trophy System with unlockable content
SD card support
It’s been a very bumpy ride for Sturmwind, and amongst the frequent setbacks and release dates, I was beginning to think we’d never see it…and what a shame it would have been too because just look at it!
Not bad for a (nearly) 15 year old games console!
So until the postie arrives with package of awesome-ness, this weekend the Dreamcast hits the geek desk because a) its been a while since I’ve used it and it needs a good test – I’d been gutted if Sturmwind arrives only to find my DC has croaked, b) Retro Revival is next month and I’m sure that if myself and fellow RCM chums happen to come across a Dreamcast, then they’ll be plenty of Soul Calibre shenanigans and I could do with a spot of practise (shh, tell no one) and finally c) I’ve had a new bit of Dreamcast kit in my desk drawer for the past six months and haven’t actually tried it out yet!
This afternoon I’ve been working on the coin mechanism for my Mame arcade machine.
On my Phoenix cabinet, the coin mechanism is all mechanical. As the coin travels through the mechanism, it rolls past and pushes a metal bar which in turn is connected to switch that registers a credit. As the switch is nothing more than a standard microswitch, it was really easy to simply connect this to the coin terminals on my ipac to allow for it to work in Mame.
However, moving over to this second cabinet, the coin mechanism is an all electronic affair and at fIrst, I didn’t think I could do anything with it…other that fabricate the same sort of metal bar/switch setup at the exit of the coin chute.
As always, the Internet is full of useful tips and after finding videos and documentation for this type of coin door, I thought I’d have a go at wiring this to my PC.
Mars MS coin mech….I’m not sure if this is a model 111 or 102 though.
The control board requires a 12v feed therefore i’ll supply this via my PC’s 12v line taken from one of the spare Molex HDD power sockets. To make it easy when disconnect the coin mech, say for example If I need to bring the PC into the house, I’m going to use a spare 4-pin molex to SATA extension cable I have in my spares.
The SATA end won’t be needed though, so this gets the snip.
I’ve taken the the 12v and ground feed from the coin mech and attached it to the PC cable via a simple termination block.
I’ve also taken the two wires from the credit terminals and wired the positive to the ‘coin’ input on my IPAC and the other to the IPAC ground wiring loom. Originally I had the coin button wired to the Player Two Start button on the Control Panel, but I’ve now returned it to it’s proper function – Two Player Start.
Should I need to bypass the coin door, in the event of being caught short of coins, I’ve found a handy IPAC shortcut sequence in Mame to simulate a coin insert – Basically you hold down one player start button & press fire button number 1….man, you’ve gotta love the shift key functions on these IPAC’s!
All good to go for testing and so I thought I’d make a quick video as I went along.
I’m quite pleased with how it turned out and will have to experiment more with the DIP switches to see what they other settings do. Certain coins that are shiny new don’t seem to work as well as older coins, maybe the reflection messes around with the coin validator?
Next I want to remove both of the doors, disconnect the mechanism, chute and locks, give them a rub down to get rid of the flaking paint and apply a fresh coat of Hammerite Black paint to make them look all new again.
That’s about all I got done this afternoon as I called my older brother and nephew on the phone to see if they fancied popping around to give my cab a play test. My nephew is a modern COD, Xbox PS3, sorta player but he was getting quite into Metal Slug and it was so cool to be playing side by side with my older brother once again, just like we back in the old days with some 2-up classics like Salamander, Double Dragon and Bubble Bobble.
With all the shenanigans of converting the Jamma arcade machine to a Mame cab just lately, coin-op games have been the staple of this week retro gaming and two classic shooters i’ve re-re-revisiting time and again are in –
Phoenix – Centuri (1980)
Pure nostalgia this one – When I think back to early arcade gaming the first game that springs to mind is Phoenix. Back in the day, it was pretty common to see an upright or cocktail cab in the corners of cafes, student clubs and chip shops. The one I remember the most was in a greasy spoon cafe not too far away from the school yard. It was an upright Centuri cab complete with that terrible faux wood paneling, but despite is looking awful, was incredibly popular during lunch (and unofficial) break.
Being the only game in the cafe, the unspoken rule was one credit if there was a queue behind you and owner of the cafe would jot down the scores and would offer free lunch to the highest monthly score.
I’ve only got to hear ‘Romance de Amor’ and I can picture the starfield scrolling down ready for the first wave of attacking birds and then onto the button bashing finale as you punch a hole through the orange defence shield of momma bird – surely a good test of a new arcade build. I play Pheonix and I’m transported back to that cafe on a Friday lunchtime happy in knowledge that the weekend was just around the corner. Bacon sandwich anyone?
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Here’s the second classic shooter i’ve been playing a lot of this week, and another that I used to drop so many pocket money coins into.
Moon Cresta – Nitchibutsu (1980)
As with Phoenix, the aim is to blast away at everything whilst trying not to get hit yourself. There’s no boss stage with Moon Cresta but after clearing a few stages, you get the chance to upgrade your ships single laser gun by docking with another craft. Sadly the trade off is that your ship is now much bigger therefore so watch that incoming fire!
I may have lost ship one, but two and three docked together makes for one mighty ship.
Moon Cresta is also one handful of games that I could recognise straight away by just one sound effect, the laser fire FX is so memorable!
Incidentally, if you fancy looking at some of home computer conversions, the ZX Spectrum version is almost arcade perfect in gameplay. Sadly the sound effects are a bit feeble.
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Setting up my emulation PC for the Mame cabinet meant transferring a hefty amount of data from my NAS and so to pass the time, I’d got my Commodore Plus/4 setup on the geek desk for a spot of gaming whist I waited. Here’s two games I keep returning too, the first being a conversion of a classic coin-op
Moon Buggy – Anirog (1985)
Moon Buggy was ported to many systems including countless clones and I’ve probably played more versions of this game than I can remember – Some are great and many are really poor. The Plus/4 – Commodore 16 version by Anirog is extremely playable though and a faithful conversion of the arcade classic. The difficulty curve, I think, is just right, starting off nice n easy and then gently increasing and rewards those who dare jump early or late.
The aim off the game is to patrol the the surface of the moon and destroy all invaders you encounter. You moon buggy is equipped with forward facing and surface to air guns as well as jump jets to propel yourself over the many craters and rocks you’ll encounter along the way.
Timing your shots, speed and jump jets is critical to completing a stage as well as keeping an eye on the ground and in the air….yep, lots to do!
Graphically it looks rather nice too with just a hint of parallax scrolling on the background and although your buggy is a simply drawn, this version does have the signature wheel explosions if you happen to fall foul of any lunar obstacles.
I think the only critisim i have is the high pitched sound FX of the enemy can sometimes become tiresome but apart from that, top notch 1/6th gravity fun.
Anirog have produced some great game covers, Moon Buggy is certainly one of them.
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Another Plus/4 game I’ve been playing is one that was only released a few years ago..you’ve gotta love the retro gaming community!
Adventures in time – Psytronic (2010)
It’s one of those games that you’re either going to love or loath due to its necessity on the pixel perfect jump…or leap into the unknown.
Give it time though and once you start to learn the layout of a few screens and the enemy patterns Adventures in Time certainly starts to grow on you and for a Plus/4 game, it looks incredible good too and has some of the best music i’ve heard coming from the TED.
I was first introduced to this last year at a Retro Event in Derby by Chris http://www.commodore16.com/ Snowdon (here’s hoping there’s going to be another one) and have been meaning to sit down with this again whenever I had the Plus/4 setup again.
A great game which all C16/plus4 owners should try.
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On to another game that’s starting to grow on me despite a fustrating start.
Gem Chaser – ZX Spectrum (2013)
There’s been a raft of new games released over at World of Spectrum and this one from a few weeks ago. It’s a remake of an indie Xbox game and all you have to do is run/jump your block around the level collecting the coloured blocks before the timer runs out. Sounds easy right?
Well, you can only collect a coloured block that matches your own colour. Failure to do so will result in a time penalty and as time is very short, you don’t want to be doing that very often.
To change your blocks colour, you need to pass through one of portals dotted around the screen. The trick to completing the level is to figure out the least timing consuming route and not to spend too much time running around haphazard.
Try not to destroy your vintage ZX Spectrum after the frustration this game will bring
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I was reading a review of a this particular game in this months edition of Retro Gamingtimes Monthly and thought i’d revisit on a the system I’d first played it on.
Pooyan – Konami (1982)
Pooyan is one of those games that i’ve heard about for many years but have not actually played it. Last year I was at one of the the Retro Computer Museum events and sat down to a system likewise that really didn’t know too much about either. Said system was the Sord M5 and it so happened to have a Pooyan cartridge loaded.
Suffice to say, I really enjoyed it and have since sourced a copy for my NES…..no chance of owning a Sord M5 myself though as they appear to be quite the collectable and demand a hefty price.
Momma Bear in basket, fires arrows at balloonist wolves……huh?
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….,and finally, after the sad announcement and closure of Lucasarts annouced a few weeks ago, I’ve been looking back at some of their classic adventures on PC and Amiga. This week it’s the four disk Amiga version of ‘Threepwood’s island of Monkey secrets’….or something to that effect
It’s looks like after many requests for iCade controller support by the fans of the Pinball Arcade iOS app, last nights update includes this much welcome addition.
You’ll need to activate iCade support first, which is lurking at the bottom of the main menu options screen….it took me a while to find it!
With that done, you can now navigate the menus etc with your iCade.
The button mapping is pretty good too, the flippers are spaced on the far left and right of the iCade buttons (on mine it’s the bottom white and bottom red button) with tilt and extra controls using the middle four buttons. For those tables with a classic plunger, pulling down on the joystick will launch the ball.
And I’m please to find that the iCade support also extends to the 8-Bitty controller too.
Sadly the buttons are a little mixed up as the flipper buttons use the top left shoulder button and one of the standard red fire buttons (bottom left). It’s a shame that both top shoulder buttons couldn’t be used although after a while you do get used to them. I suppose there’s always Blutrol if you want to customise yourself?
I’ve not tried the iCade Jnr on my iPhone yet but I’d be pretty confident in guessing that it’ll work too.
The Internet is already displaying fan made iCade/pinball modifications using the Blutrol app, but having native iCade support means that you can mod away without having to Jailbreak your device.
I don’t think I’m wanting to drill into my own iCade just yet though but an idea is forming for my own pinball mod.
And finally, this latest app update also brings another classic 80′s table – Space Shuttle (Williams) with promise of more vintage tables to follow. My vote is on Meteor please.
Now this is impressive! This gentleman (Tom Murphy) has created a program that actually learns how to play classic Nintendo games.
The video itself is pretty amazing and well worth watching all the way through to get an understanding of how the program works. However, if you just want to jump right in to see the results, fast forward to around the 6:10 mark.
Are we seeing the beginning of Skynet? First it learns how to play Space Invaders and then think’s ‘woo, I wonder if I can get a higher score shooting humans?’……..and so it begins
Only a quick update on the arcade cabinet today. I’ve now got two replacement locks for the coin doors and one for the rear back panel which I’ve fitted this evening. The removable portion of the back panel is practically held on with just the lock so it’ll be nice to have it in position again to shut out all the light bleeding in around the edge of the monitor.
Having had to source these from a gazillion online vendors and pouring over endless searches, I’m becoming a bit of a lock nerd and find myself talking about cams , tumblers, tubular seven pin, cam barrels, keyed to differ or alike, straight or cranked, 90 or 180 rotation. Also I’ve discovered that if you’ve accidentally ordered a straight cam instead of one that needs a slightly cranked end, one should simply whack it a few times with a large hammer. Perfect!
If there’s any lock nerds out there that are interested, mine are 27mm cam locks, keyed alike, 90 degree turn with 45mm straight cams….and one slightly bent one.
Also, if anyone knows how to cure lock nerdism, please let me know.
My order from Gremlin Solutions arrived today with a fresh set of buttons for the arcade machine.
I had no idea that they come supplied with switches so it was a nice surprise to find them included too. Most of the control panel switches were replaced last week but I think there’s one or two of from the original set that remain on the 2-up side. Now I’ve got a few spare, I think I’ll swap these out for new too.
I really do like working on this flip down control panel. I wished my Phoenix cabinet was the same.
I’ve also swapped out the four (x2) joystick bolts. All were rusty and looked horrible. Note to myself….don’t misplace the 9/32 sockethead or you’ll have to undo them bit my bit with pliers!
During the evenings this week I’ve been building a PC for my Mame Arcade cabinet with a view to sorting out the Mame front end for it today. It’s a basic PC and nothing fancy but it’ll play Mame games perfectly well including a few other dedicated arcade emulators that need a bit more oomph to run. Emulators like Zinc, Mojnir, Daphne, Nebulas, and AAE (with a bit of tweaking).
Here’s the specs -
Pentium 4 2.8mhz
2gb Ram
Geforce 7800GTx
120gb HDD
WinXP – SP2…I did consider Windows 2000 originally as I want this thing to boot as quickly as possible but XP seems fine as is.
Further modification ais required to provide power (via the spare 4-pin molex) to other parts of the cabinet but for now, a basic setup will suffice.
With that done, it on to the emulator front end.
I was going to break from my norm of using either MameWah or Mala and try the incredibly gorgeous looking Hyperspin .
I’ve been messing around with Hyperspin for a few days and it certainly ramps up the eye candy to ‘number 11′ by adding animated menus, transitional animations, system and game specific themes, arcade sounds and gameplay videos. When set up correctly it looks superb!
Check it out in action -
Of course, to get it set up properly, you’re going to have to invest in some serious time to if you intend to source and download each file individually. There are collections out there that contain all of the files in one go but you’re looking at downloads of anywhere between 45gb to 95gb – Yup that’s gigabytes, not megabytes :-O
Initially the thought of getting all of those files individually didn’t really put me off because I wasn’t going to be running a full mame rom set in my arcade machine, just a select few of my favourite arcade games. At the last count, this came to about 126 game titles and so not a huge amount of time to sit at the Hyperspin download area.
As I began to installing and my collection of themes, artwork, movies and sounds began to grow, a couple of things became apparent.
Firstly, Hyperspin mainly uses Adobe Flash and runs movies in .flv format (soon to change I hear) thus it benefits from a fast processor and lots of RAM. Having a half descent graphics card make no difference with Hyperspin and therefore my low spec P4 and 2Gb just wasn’t cutting it. Even with small list of games and a small number of themes, it’s was beginning to suffer and was very laggy overall. Just scrolling though a list of games could often be a pain.
I tried it on my laptop (Intel Core I3 /4gb laptop and even though it has a crummy integrated video Hyperspin runs silky smooth.
Hyperspin has a setup utility that can tailor the amount of graphics options to suit your requirements (as well as quality) which goes some way to speed things up. However, even running as a low resolution, the lag was too much for me. Swapping out the movies for screenshots helped somewhat, but with a larger rom list, the lag was back
Secondly, yes it looks and sounds nice but after awhile all that gloss seems to just get in the way when all you just need to quickly zip through to the game you want and off you go. The noise from all those sound effects playing out at you navigate through the game list was too much for me too. Of course you do have the option to turn the sounds off.
Maybe if I upgrade the PC, I’ll look at HyperSpin again, but for now I think I’ll stick with something a little lighter on the senses.
Also, I’ve since changed my mind on the number of rom images to include too as more often than not, having all often brings a hidden gem to light.
However….8000+ roms including all of the clones and umpteen Mah-jong games are really not required on this particluar cabinet so it’s time to crack open some software apps to trim down 26gb of roms into something more manageable.
Using a copy of Catver.ini you can easily filter out all of the rom files by category (or individual files if you want 100% control).
I don’t think I want any tabletop games so that’s 428 roms removed (or renamed in the event that you make a mistake).
With MCM I’ve trimmed down my rom set to about 4000 titles (including clones) which I’ll filter out with custom lists using another handy piece of software called ROM Lister - http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/
To get the best out of ROMLister, it’s best to create a master list of your Rom collection (I usually do this after I’ve removed the unwanted roms with MCM) By opening a command line, browse to the Mame folder and run mame -listxml > mame.xml
This will create a file called mame.xml with all the games listed. Next, I use ROMLister to scan my rom folder to produce a list of the rom files I have. Add in Catv.ini and I can merge these lists to filter out even more unwanted roms.
Filter by category, monitor orientation buttons and controls. Don’t think I’ll be needing lightgun games etc.
Both of these tools are great to use on a whole range of emulator frontends whether directly, or importing the lists and converted them to the standard that the frontend uses.
So now that I’ve decided not to use Hyperspin just yet, I thought I’d settle on either Mame32, Mala or MameWah.
Mame32 is a great, no frills frontend which is both light and fast. If run Mame on my desktop, then Mame32 is the frontend I would usually use. Sure, it’s not pretty but it works perfectly and is super robust with plenty of options.
Mala – FE was the one I was going to use and have used this on many Mame projects before including one of the arcade cabinets at the Retro Computer Museum and my defunct bartop. There’s lots of options to play with as well as theme support so you can build a nice frontend as complex or as simple as you like.
For some reason though, these past few days I’ve been fighting with Mala and for some unknown reason I cannot for the life of me get it so ‘see’ my rom lists. No matter what I do, my game list always shows as being 72 games! I’ve tried other frontends using the same lists and they all appear to be fine. In the end, I gave up…..:-(
…..and have come full circle as I’ve decided to stick with an old friend – MameWAH.
The first time I played around with MameWah was around eight or so years ago and back then I found it a little too confusing to set some of the advanced options. However it doesn’t take to long to get it running the way you want it (the documentation is much better these days) including multiple themes for each emulator.
I wanted my main Mame theme to be quite simple one – Just a game list, a corresponding screenshot and not much else really. Originally, I was going to have a simple ‘Galaga’ style space backdrop but in the end, I found a Space Invader image on DeviantArt which I messed around with in Photoshop and added a little neon (Font and FX plugin) and colour to match the red, white and blue colouring of my cabinet.
Here’s a rough mock up (not the monitor I’ll be using) but I think I’ll change the game list from centre to left justification.
Hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before I can test it out in the cabinet.
Coding Epiphany have posted a great, easy to read, easy to follow guide for setting up your Raspberry Pi for a spot of old school gaming using the Retro Pie & Arch packages.
I must admit, after the initial flurry of excitement when I received my Pi and experimentation that followed with with Raspbian, RaspBMC and the ‘Atarberry’ 2600 I’ve not actually done much else with it since.
These great guides might just spur me on to take another look sometime soon.
Well I wasn’t expecting to own another arcade machine when I woke up this morning but after practically being snowed in today and a carefree session on eBay – pop, got myself another one!
It was a bit of a bargain really and was quite surprised to win it at a very low price without many bids. It’s a standard Jamma cab rather than a specific game (the board included is some sort of soccer game) and despite everything looking in really good condition, the monitor appears to be faulty. That’s no problem though as I intend to swap it out for something slightly bigger anyway.
Its more than likely that I’ll use this as a basis for a quick Mame conversion especially as i have everything i need in my spares box to complete this straight away. The cabinet has two sticks fitted (wooho – Robotron twin stick funtastic-times ahead) with three buttons per stick. I could drill through for more, the control panel certainly has room for them but I think I’ll keep this as is and mainly use it for playing classic games.
A couple of features that attracted me to the cab in the first place was that the monitor can be easily be rotated, by lifting out the front glass bezel, rotate the screen and pop the glass back. It’s also slightly taller than my other arcade cabinet and a bonus being quite a tall fella.
All I need to do now is arrange to go pick it up…come on snow melt already!
I’ll be back with more and pictures as soon as I’ve got it and will blog about the conversion as I progress.
Out of curiosity, how many cabs do you have to own to count yourself as having your own arcade hall
You’ll need to wear your extra strength glasses for his one - Jet Set Willy meets Little Computer People in a one screen Mini Willy platform adventure.
Can you find my Willy?
A-ha, there I am on the right. Although I think I’m going to need some help if I’m going to get through this.
Much better.
Basically, you make your way around the level, jumping and avoiding all the moving nasties and traps whilst collecting the various items dotted around the place – Collect them all to win the game. You’ll die often (or is that just me?) but thankfully there’s a couple of handy checkpoint flags along the way so you won’t have to restart all the way from the very beginning.
It’s quite a nice challenging mini game and one that’ll get you swearing at the screen a few times. Once you get the hang of it, it sh….dammit, dead again!
This is one of a handful of retro inspired (Windows)games by Trevor Story and it’s well worth checking out some of his other releases at - http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/
If you have time this weekend I highly recommend checking out the remake of the C64 hit Aztec Challenge.
There’s nothing like booting up an old machine (as long as it does boot) especially if its been a while since it was last out of the box. Take my Commodore Plus/4 for example, which I’ve set up on the geek desk in anticipation of some weekend retro gaming, but no matter how often I see it, having some brand new software loaded on an old system makes me very happy.
March 2013 on a machine thats almost kicking 30 years. Feel the love!
Thanks to both my modded sd2iec and CBM Browser which now supports the C16 and Plus/4, computers I can now sample these goodies on the real hardware.
I played Norbert Kehrer’s Asteroids emulator on the C64 when it was released at the beginning of the month but I had no idea that there was an alleged faster version on the Plus/4.
Exciting news coming from Revival Events as we count down the weeks until to their big retro gaming event in May – They’ve only gone and found a working Virtual Reality!
This unit will be available for visitors to sample.
Back in the early 90′s when VR was was state of the art and a technology that would change the world, I was working for IBM and through some contract or another there was a team of engineers that were involved in the initial setup of a VR centre. I’m not entirely sure what IBM’s involvement were (i think theyprovided the high end workstations) but short story was, I somehow managed to blag my way to accompany the engineers and a have looksee for myself.
There were three VR booths in total so I climbed into one and donned the helmet with the help of one of the engineers. You stood in the centre of the booth which some sort of roofless cage that had a padded barrier about waist height which would stop you from wandering off and hurting yourself once plugged into the VR world. I managed to grab myself a good few hours on one whilst the other engineers did their IBM engineering thang.
The huge VR helmet looked a lot heavier than what it actually was and I was surprised on how light it was considering the tech inside and what i hoped wouldn’t be a giant needle that would connect my brain to the monster 486 PC rigs
Just nippin out for a pint of milk luv.
You also had sort of wired grip that you held in one hand and this would be reproduced in the VR world allowing you to interact with the environment or in the case of one of the games, hold a sword. The grandfather of the wii-mote?
Expecting some kind of funky sci-fi tunnel effect I ‘plugged into VR’. Sadly, nothing like that…just static.
Those initial tech demos which were mainly 3D rooms that you could ‘walk’ and look around. There was nothing much to do here other than to get used to the VR helmet tracking system which relay the image on screen based to the helmet movement. You could also manipulate certain items using your digital hand which really was cool. Tried as much as I did though I still couldn’t Virtual flip the bird.
Despite the low refresh frame rate, primitive polygon graphics and camera flicker. This was fascinating stuff alright and at times you really felt part of this new world.
After the tech demo, I got chance to play a game and a opportunity to really interact with the VR environment Details are a little sketchy as it was a long time ago but I seem to recall the VR world being set in some sort of medieval/fantasy castle and I remember stone walls, draw bridges and flaming torches on the walls. I also remember the 3D sword welding skeleton that you had to fight as well….Maybe I should have taken the red and blue pill?
Well, when I say fight, what I mean was waving your VR sword around in the hope of either hitting ol’boney or parry any inbound blows. I’d like to say it was realistic but sadly it wasn’t. It was slow, unresponsive and the screen flicker gave you a head ache…..but, it was a first step into something us Tron loving gamers had been dreaming about for year.
Sadly, VR never really caught on but who knows now that entertainment technology is steering towards immersible experiences with 3D, motion control console gaming and augmented reality – I for one am really excited about those Google Goggles..sorry glasses.
Still, as a fan of older retro technology be it cool or crap, I’m really looking forward to trying out that retro chic VR booth at Revival and donning the helmet again.
) , a good portion of game time has been swapped for gardening time and man-cave swapped for greenhouse. One plant I’m growing for fun this year could be considered a game of sort as when fully ripe and touched in the wrong place, ‘exploding cucumbers’ quite literally explode….and quiet violently too as they throw out their seeds at speed. Missile Command in the greenhouse? What I’m hoping to do is capture some of them on my camera as it has a video mode at super slo-mo 1000 frames per second.
