This is my main cabinet,
which I, uh, I built some years ago
and it now lives permanently here
at the hack space.
We don't accept money, everything is free
*laughs*
Um, so in order to insert coins, I just provide a button
You can have as many credits as you like.
When people see it for the first time
They, they're always looking for the game that they played when they were kids.
It's a custom carpentry cabinet that was built around a 17 inch monitor at the time
The reason why it has the, uh, all of the shape that it has was so that I could play the game Defender
in as realistic a manner as possible.
*game noises*
Inside we have an old Pentium 4. It just happens to be the most recent free PC I got hold of
MAME is an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
just emulates different, um, arcade machine hardware.
They were just computers
There were quite a lot of popular processors
Uh, Z80s, 6800s, 68000s
It's basically just a PC and the only fancy stuff is the controls
[offscreen] Can we have a look?
Well, the joysticks and buttons are just microswitches.
All of the microswitches come out and come into a keyboard matrix.
Whilst this one is based on a keyboard matrix breakout that I managed to get as part of my job,
previous incarnations I've had, I've just ripped out the keyboard matrix from a keyboard
but when you press a button on a keyboard, there's a two-dimensional matrix of contacts
You join up, uh, a row and a column, uh, that sends a signal to a small, very small PIC
Programmable Interrupt Controller, PIC
Which interprets that and sends out a keyboard scan code to the PC.
You get a means of inputting 150 different buttons or something like that.
In practice you can't really use all of those button presses because keyboard controllers tend to think that if you press more than four buttons at once
that the cat's sat on the keyboard or something like that, and it disables those keys.
The various keypresses that result from joystick movements come into what is broken out as a keyboard matrix here
and just goes down into the PC
I've also got an external keyboard
for convenient typing of commands and what-have-you.
These joysticks are either 8-way or 4-way
If you were playing a maze-type game, say pacman,
you definitely don't want diagonals because they register, say, up and left at the same time
and it's entirely up to the game whether you're gonna go left or up when you get to a junction.
These joysticks have a built-in template that's selectable from above
which is one of the reasons why I spent the massive 50 pounds on these joysticks
which limits the angles at which the joystick can go, it basically cuts out the corners
so that you can only go up, down, left, or right
and that's selected by lifting the joystick, and giving it a twist
Currently runs a version of Ubuntu, a very lightweight Ubuntu called Xubuntu, spelled with an X
Linux is free, you're free to make it do just what you want, so that you retain control of your computing experience.
It's not the most recent Ubuntu release. Each upgrade require a bit more, uh, computing power.
So I'm going for the low-end Ubuntu, lightweight distribution.
And every time I change it, there are things to fix, so I'm sticking with what I've got right now.
Okay, right so
[offscreen] so this comes out in a drawer, very handy
Yes, please excuse the mess. It's basically running the XFCE desktop
The Cholesterol Free Computing Environment
I'm using a frontend called wahcade, which is basically a python frontend that will give us a nice keyboard-based user interface
through which we can select which game we want to play, launch the game
and it starts the MAME application for us,
hiding all the computing business.
We're free to select from the different games that I happen to have
The cabinet design is based on the genuine Defender arcade machine
developed by Williams in 1980.
*game noise*
In fact, the code for this was written over a weekend
in time for a trade fair. And it turned out to be one of the most popular games of the early 1980s
Defender is a strange game in that it has an up and down joystick and seven additional buttons
It does mean that I use both player 1 and player 2 controls
And so, although I'm not playing very well at the moment, because I'm trying to multitask - *laughs*
My intention is to - *screams* - become as good as the heroes I had when I was a teenager
Who would play Defender all day in the arcade
for just 10p
I only really work with stuff that I get for nothing
Stuff that would otherwise be thrown away
This is an old monitor from a railway destination indicator. I get to pick up things like this due to my job
when we do refurbishments of railway stations.
It will have displayed departures, how late your train is, that sort of thing.
There's a certain amount of screen burn which is hard to see right now
but, there's a, yeah