Hello, and welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy.
In a previous episode, I did a review on the Gameboy camera.
And, while I thought it was cool, I wasn’t exactly blown away by the high resolution
graphics.
Well, I got a lot of emails of people suggesting I try something called the Wormcam.
Well, I’ve got one now, so let’s try it out!
OK, so this is a new, old-stock product.
I find it interesting that the plastic for the packaging has yellowed.
There’s no way into this package other than to cut it open.
OK, so this is interesting, this is a serial cable to link it to your Windows 95 PC, but
it uses what appears to be a USB mini B connector, but is most likely is not USB in any way.
So, one thing I notice right away about this product is that it appears to have something
that slides into the cartridge port, but there are no pins.
So, there is no actual connection to the memory or address bus.
The only actual connection it has is via the link cable port.
So, what happens when you power this thing on is that it has to download the code from
the device over the link port into the gameboy advance’s internal memory, so this takes
a moment.
Once it does come up, it’s not super obvious how to use the thing.
In fact, I couldn’t get it to work at all, but I eventually realized I needed to remove
this little tab to allow the internal battery to make contact.
OK, so up to this point I was thinking the product was probably going to be pretty cool.
But, I couldn’t figure out how to take any pictures with it.
I actually had to read the manual and found out that you have to push the right button
on the back of the gameboy advance to actually use as the shutter button, which actually
kind of makes sense, you know, you can go like that and take a picture.
But here’s the problem.
There’s no viewfinder on the camera anywhere.
There’s no physical viewfinder that you can actually like look through, and there’s
no live preview on the screen anywhere.
And, the reason for that is because the data is so slow coming from the camera that once
you push the shutter button, it takes like 30 seconds for the picture to actually come
through.
So, by that point whatever you were taking a picture of is probably long gone.
This is really annoying, but the real problem is I think my camera is defective, because
all I can get, and I have tried taking pictures outdoors and indoors and I’ve tried all
4 different lighting configurations and I can either get black images or white images
and occasionally I can get an image with kind of an outline of whatever it is that I was
trying to take a picture of.
But, I just couldn’t get anything better than that.
And, when I looked up other reviews of the camera, I found a lot of people complaining
about the same dilemma that it’s virtually impossible to get a picture on this thing
that actually looks like anything.
However, I did see some photographs that samples that were taken and they looked a lot better
than what I could get so I still think mine may be defective.
Maybe just all these years of sitting in the package, I don’t know.
Anyway, so, all I can say is this is a piece of junk, don’t buy it let’s move onto
something else!
I just got back from the Portland Retro Gaming Expo where I shared a booth with these 3 awesome
guys.
And I gave a presentation about the new game I’ve been developing for the last year.
But I was also given some interesting products to take home and check out.
This one here is a new pac-man style game for the Commodore 64, which comes on floppy
disk.
Kind of interesting, but I’ll check this out later.
At the moment, I’m more interested in these.
These are called the Arduboy.
Let’s open the Tetris version and see what’s inside.
All right, so here it is.
The Tetris Microcard.
Haha, it sounds like a gameboy.
OK.
Neat.
So, I realize that adding the little projected copy of your current piece is something that
more modern versions of Tetris usually do.
I tend to prefer the original where you have to judge it better.
However, the screen is so small on this guy, that the projected piece does help a lot.
The controls are surprisingly effective.
They are easy to push, and do provide some tactile feedback, making it much better to
play than a modern iPhone or tablet version.
It sounds like there are at least two voices here, one for the song and one for the sound
effects.
Either that, or they are alternating it so quickly with the music that it just blends
in to our ears.
Apparently it uses a rechargeable battery and it is charged with a USB cable.
However., it does come with this really nifty USB cable.
I’ve never seen one quite like this before.
Basically, it is missing the metal piece.
I’ll try plugging it into this old Titanium Powerbook.
It doesn’t come with one, but should in theory work with any power brick like this.
There is a little LED that lights up to let you know it is charging.
So how big is this thing really?
Well, compared to this business card, it’s not quite the same dimensions, but it is almost
identical in size to an old PCMCIA card from the late 1990s.
In fact, it’s pretty close to the same thickness too.
Let’s take it apart.
I want to see if there are any other chips besides the micro controller we see through
the top.
I’m also curious what sort of battery cell it uses.
All right, so here is what the little buttons look like.
On the back there is a very thin lithium pouch cell and a piezo speaker.
And there appears to be a lot of writing under the battery cell.
Well, let’s move on to the other arduboy.
This is a more generic device that can play many different games.
Let’s open it up.
Here’s a little card, Arduboy, card-sized gaming.
Neat, it actually looks like a credit-card sized gameboy.
It’s kind of cool that you can see the guts of the device.
But I could also see it being cool to have an opaque colored top case, so that you only
see the buttons and screen.
Neat, so it already has a game built-in.
However, you are supposed to be able to copy new games over to it.
I’m not familiar with this game.
It’s really well polished, though.
I would imagine there are no sprites or anything, so the entire screen is probably being re-drawn
many times a second.
But considering it is a monochrome screen with pretty low resolution, it probably doesn’t
need that much CPU power to do that.
Comparing this unit with the Tetris unit, they are essentially identical in size, they
just have a different layout.
Although it does appear they use a slightly different micro controller.
So, let’s have a look at the specifications for this thing.
It runs on an Atmel Atmega32.
So, believe it or not, it is actually an 8-Bit CPU, which makes it perfect for my channel,
right?
It runs at 16 Mhz, it has 2.5 K of RAM, which is not much.
But it also has 32 K of flash memory to store the program code and other data.
It also has an EEPROM with 1 K built in.
I’m not sure what the advantage of the EEPROM is over the flash, but anyway, that gives
it 35 and a half kilobytes of total memory.
The display is an OLED, so it is visible in both light and dark situations.
It has a pretty low resolution of 128 by 64 pixels.
Even the original gameboy had more pixels than this.
It appears to be 1-bit monochrome, as I can’t see any grayscale being used.
OK, so what if you want to download more games?
Well, if you go to their website, there’s quite a list of games in different states
of development you can download for free.
I don’t really recognize any of these names, so I’ll just pick one at random.
Omega Horizon.
OK, so I saw this button for “upload to arduboy” and thought that surely it can’t
be that easy.
And it wasn’t.
So I tried downloading the file.
So, it says I need to download this program called the Arduboy uploader.
However, I can’t find a version for OS X, so instead I have to download the entire Arduino
suite.
All right, so I did that.
Here’s the Arduino program.
I’ve never seen this before so I have no idea what I’m doing.
Can I drag and drop.
Nope.
Can I open the file manually.
Nope.
It seems that this program only wants to deal with source code, not compiled binaries.
So I’ll switch over to my Windows 7 machine.
I can install the uploader.
And I was able to import a game into the uploader.
However, when I plugged in my Arduboy, Windows couldn’t find a driver for it.
So I had to download and install the whole Arduino suite after all, just to get the USB
driver setup.
So I plugged it in again, and this time, it successfully installed the driver.
So, let’s see if I can upload Mystic Balloon.
Well, it’s doing something.
However, my arduboy just rebooted back to the same game.
However, I tried it one more time and it did actually work.
So let’s have a look at Mystic Balloon.
There’s a bit of flicker showing up on camera, but you can’t see this in person.
I think this is a neat device, probably, for learning how to code with Arduino, or perhaps
micro-controllers in general.
But, this thing costs $50 and it’s kind of tough to get games onto it.
On the bright side.
this is a relatively new product.
So in time, it may at least get easier to put games on it.
Still, I don’t think it’s ever going to be a popular gaming platform for people just
wanting to play games on it.
I think this is definitely targeted more towards developers.
So, I wanted to show you one more thing I was given in Portland.
This is the first issue to a new magazine called Oldschool Gamer.
I’ll cut the plastic here so we can have a look inside.
OK, so let’s have a look at this.
It looks very well made.
Can’t complain about the quality.
Oh look, an advertisement for the National Video Game Museum.
That’s actually here in the Dallas area.
I’ve been to that and can vouch it is definitely worth checking out.
So yeah, a lot of articles and relevant advertisements.
I’ll have to sit down and read through this.
But overall, I like it so far!
And, it also comes with this fold out poster, which is pretty cool.
So, anyway, I appreciate all of the different gear that was given to me at the Portland
Retro Gaming Expo, and I also really enjoyed running into Ben Heck and Metal Jesus, and
all of my fans that came to see me at my booth, so I’ll see you guys again there next year
and as for the worm cam, I gave it the one fate that I thought it deserved.
Well, at least we got to see what’s inside of it.