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So good evening, Young.
Or good afternoon, or
if you're in Congress time,
good morning,
NYC Resistor is
a Brooklyn based hackerspace founded
in 2008 and inspired,
I'm told, by the founding
members coming to the CCC and
looking at all the things going on here
and decided this is something that we
need in New York.
It occupies the same
space, a sweet spot of
the Congress, which is the intersection
of art and technology.
And this talk is a perfect example of
that.
It's about a retro gaming
and it's only it's one of the four
talks that are being presented here by
NYC Resistor.
And with that, I like to
pause here for station identification.
No, I'm I'm going
to say I'd like you to help
me give it up for Adil
Lynn and Tramel Hudson.
To gets the rock star Mike.
Well, thank you all for being with us
during our technological troubles.
I'm Trouble Hudson from NYC Resistor.
Hi, I'm Adele.
Adele in from NYC Resistor.
And we're here to talk about vectors
and vector games and the history
of vector games.
So we're going to quickly run through
the early stages of Victor
Victor monitors, so
at the start, Victor, monitors are mainly
used to display
outputs from analog computers.
Here you can see the AI
six 680, which is used to
implement differential equations
and you can see the vector scope.
Look right at the top left corner there.
So here you have a bunch of forms
outputting and implementing the
differential equations and the
knobs there, which are used to control
the inputs.
And you can see all those great
ingredients for creating a video game,
which is what happened with tennis for
two. So at the Brookhaven National
Labs, we had physicists
William Higginbottom for
for the Demo Day decided you want to do
something a little bit more fun.
So instead of demonstrating
and calculating projectiles,
ballistic projectiles, he was like, well,
let's create a video game.
And that's how tennis for two came about.
In 1997, for the fiftieth anniversary,
there was a second recreation by another
physicist, Peter Tucker.
And the interesting part
of this is that this video game
was created entirely out of
animal parts.
So you had realized
you had resistors that simulate a drag.
And the star of the show, we were told at
the time, was the germanium
alloy transistors retries,
which allowed for really fast switching
during gameplay.
And I was really lucky in earlier
this year to be part to be able to do
the third well, the second recreation
of tennis for two.
But this time it was we did it entirely,
digitally.
So the reason for this is this is part
of the Silicon City exhibition at
the New York Historical Society.
And as an exhibit that needs to be up for
five months, we
weren't able to use analog parts because
as we're told on the day itself, we
had engineers at the even national
labs having to switch out relays and
parts itself.
So, as you can
see, we emulated the original
Domun CRT screen
by creating our own cabinets.
And this was created using unity
and are doing this.
So tennis for two being the original
analog video game space, where
was the the first
ever digital video
game again shown
produced on the PDP one
ported to a Vector X..
It was wildly popular and people lots
of people created their own controllers
and their own versions of that.
A slightly different type of vector
display, the storage
tube displays, so for example,
the Tektronix four thousand series
we have here, they use
to create some really, really beautiful
high res
hirers drawings.
But these these are kind of
permanent drawings.
So as you can see, for example, the
Utah teapot here, which is the standard
vector drawing a
3D rendering reference,
this kind of takes 30 seconds
to to do the full drawing
and then you need to pick it up and shoot
the thing to kind of reset it.
So kind of
like why vector's why at a time where
video games were done, unrestrictive
displays were Vector's.
Mainly because it was hugely
expensive, so the Vector
X Beatrix's
were able to draw some really
high res drawings using
really low bandwidth and low memory
and to do to use arrestor display
that would have the buffering to
hold a ten, twenty four by ten, twenty
four frame rate of the original asteroid
sort of cost thousands and thousands of
dollars.
And also take a look at kind of
a bitmap version of Star Wars versus
one done on a vector display.
Look at the you know, the resolution in
the roundness.
It's just incredibly beautiful.
Victor displays are amazing for doing
3D animation at the time,
compared look at, again, the bitmap
version versus
the victor version of the typewriter.
There you can get
you can get an amazing scaling
and rotation and really depth
to the image and a really kind of much
more immersive feel, I think, to playing
the game.
So the there are a couple of different
ways to generate the vectors, and these
are analog signals that are steering the
beam around the scope,
there are two main techniques that were
used in the Atari systems.
The earliest ones were called digital
vector generation, and they directly
moved the beam around.
So lunar lander as shown here
where we've disabled the Z Channel.
So the you can actually see the traces.
It goes from one point directly to
the next The Tempest
later game always returns
to the center in between drawing
each item.
And that's because the analog
voltage generator, they're actually the
analog vector generator takes the output
of the deck and feeds it into a
integrating. And so the deck
is actually controlling the slope of
the line rather than the position
that the line goes to.
And then they had a
a transistor that allowed them to short
the capacitor to return
to the center of the screen.
This made for a much smoother lines and
also reduce the CPU bandwidth
required to to generate
the segments
because they only had to change the value
when they wanted to start trying a
different line. As long as it was
continuing at the same slope, they could
go off and compute other things.
Meanwhile, we have plenty of CPU
horsepower today so we can do all sorts
of things to to improve the efficiency of
the displays, like sorting
the vectors and doing a top logical sort
so that we minimize the transit
time, which is the dominant cost
in displaying things on these screens.
And we can even do this, a lot of this
in small microcontrollers,
the now the board
that we've built as part of this open
source hardware is built on a teensy
three and uses a microchip
forty nine to d'Arc
that gives us twelve bits of
analog resolution.
So, you know, this is basically a
do it yourself Fourcade display
with literally three components, a
teensy and two DACs.
We're also working on a slightly more
packaged version, again, as
open source hardware and open source
software that will be
more suitable for driving things that
need differential outputs
or dual ended outputs.
So now that we have a way to generate
the vectors, we need some way to display
them.
My suggestion is save your money.
Don't go buy one of those fancy storage
scopes. They'll cost you 20000
dollars and that you can't actually do
Animation's on them.
You might already have a digital scope
with an X Y mode.
And it's great for debugging
signals, but it quantize is
everything down to eight bits.
And so really
what we're looking for.
So, you know, keep that in your toolbox
for debugging your digital problems and
you can go to Craigslist or eBay and pick
up an old CRT analog scope.
People are giving these things away for,
you know, 20 to 50 euros.
And they're actually really great
displays for a lot of the stuff.
You can also find Victor Scope's from
TV stations that are decommissioning all
of their NTSC and PÃ¥l
equipment, I picked up four
of them for one hundred one hundred
dollars plus fifty dollars of shipping.
And, you know, they are super
fast, super sharp.
They really make great displays.
And the other option
is the Vector X console, which
people were really excited about back in
the 80s.
This was a home vector arcade
game system, and
we have one up here on loan from
CCC Berlin, and
it's really easy to
convert it from a.
To basically remove the the
sixty five year to bring that it had
and hook up your own dack
and it doesn't modify doesn't
damage the system at all.
If you unfortunately, because this is a
very low cost display,
it doesn't have as much bandwidth as
the
the arcade cabinets.
So if you try to use the timing
parameters that they have, you end up
with kind of an artistic sort of thing.
But with a little bit of tweaks in the
timing, you can actually get a really
nice sharp vector's good reproducibility.
And it's really, you
know, about the same level of
acceptable gameplay as
as a multi megahertz oscilloscope.
Laser projectors seem like they'd be a
natural fit, since they are also zwi
displays.
The problem is that they are even slower
than the backtracks and
most of the arcade games are just much
too complicated to play.
And you end up with really bad
flickering.
It might be possible to generate some
some new games that take advantage of of
lasers, but until then,
we kind of shelter our laser project for
now.
What folks are looking for when they're
emulating these vector systems is this
sort of beautiful kind of sharp pixel
pixel, three lines in the kind of
the bloom of the bright vectors.
And meme has a way to emulate that,
but it just kind of fuzzes out things.
And it's it's not really
as good as the real display.
But what meme does a great job of
is emulating thousands of games,
including every vector game
that's listed on Wikipedia
and the
and you can find the ROMs and the usual
sort of places.
So we've written a patch
for name that hooks
into the into it
and is able to to exploit those vectors.
And it's not a very large patch.
And basically we grab
the vectors when they're being handed off
to the open goal line drawing
and send a copy of them out the support
to the board that we've designed.
Unfortunately, the same team felt this
was unacceptably hackey and
they closed that, they rejected
the call request.
So until then you can clone
my name tree and I have
build instructions on my website.
This also works in the
name for All Distribution,
which runs on the Raspberry Pi.
So you don't if you want to build a small
cabinet, you can put a little pie in
there with one of these digital
analog boards to create
a multi vector arcade game
system.
So when you go out and you find those
ROMs wherever you find them,
you can get the original space where you
can get asteroids, which is one of the
most popular, highest grossing
games of all time.
Tempest's and Lunar Lander are really a
lot of fun.
Star Wars was an officially
licensed franchise and this
is an awesome game.
Battlezone is one of the first real 3D
like games.
Star Trek even had a licensed franchise,
Empire Strikes Back.
Unfortunately, there is no Force Awakens
vector game. But if somebody wants to
write one, that would be awesome.
And really there's a whole bunch of
vector games out there. Most of them are
pretty obscure.
I had never heard of many of them until I
started down this project of building
these. Some of them are OK.
Some of them are just complete
rip offs of other games.
But there's a lot of fun things to sort
of experiment with.
And I guess once you've got your games
going, you obviously want to make your
own custom controls and your own, you
know, beautiful cabinets,
I'm sure everyone has given this go that,
you know, you can design almost anything
and print and create anything these days.
You can get you control this from a
fruit, even your own coin
receptors, all kinds of different
buttons.
Take, for example, Tim Bartletts asteroid
asteroid game. He's
got the original designs printed them
on and laser cut
them and all the fancy patterns
that you can get them all on his website.
You're going to Mueller also created his
own asteroid's cabinet.
It's kind of half sized, it's using a
Bacharach's machine and when
using the original asteroid's logic
boards and again, another kind
of great example.
So now that you have your games, you
got your own cabinets, you actually maybe
you want to make your own creations.
This is an tremolos clone of asteroids,
space rocks, which you can get from his
website as well.
Um, you know, when you're done playing,
he may just want to know what time it is
and how many hours you spent.
You can make your own scope clock
the teens, you three has three holes,
which you can put your clock crystals on
and, you know, get this really beautiful
display for your home.
This is a super cool
game that was shown at the Maker
Faire in New York earlier this year.
It's kind of like one of the first
original the newest original
arcade games, something that hasn't
really been done in like 30 years.
And it's got its own like tank
controllers. And again, it's a
really great custom cabinet.
In order to help you do that, we've also
got a processing library, which,
you know, everybody is processing,
you can make your own vector art or
processing games and import it to the
tunes. You three and a game, make your
own cabinets.
You have your own game systems
at home.
Here's just a quick look of what you need
in the processing library, you get your
vector lions and then you kind of send
them out.
So to take this step further, I'm
part of a group called Collaboration, and
we teach coding for a game design
to women and we'll be running a
processing to Vector X workshop
in NYC Resistor, and
then we'll be also
organizing a demo party night baby
Cassells later on after that.
So if you guys are in the region, you
know, to come along and join us.
But since you're in the region now
at seven, 30, you can also find us
and the Vector X and oscilloscope
at all a two,
you'll be able to play all of the
original Atari vector games.
So, yeah, do come in.
Say hi.
So thank you all so much for coming to
the talk.
We've got the slides from the talk and
a bunch of background material on
the website, as well as information on
converting the Vector X and some
different vector scopes.
And also then the schematics and open
source hardware is available from
beta test and
would love to open up to any questions.
So if you want to ask a question, please
step up to one of the microphones and
make yourself available.
In the meantime, the people
who are leaving, could you leave, please?
Quietly Do we
have a question over there?
Have you thought about using multiple
lasers to compensate for the slow
speed of laser?
Do you think that would be possible?
You would certainly be possible.
We have it's very easy to add
additional attacks or dark channels.
I haven't tried it personally.
And of course, that would also
require some amount of calibration.
The other thing I've seen some folks do
is set up sort of
exclusion list so that
a lot of the small text, like the
copyright 1979 Atari gets
excluded from what could straughn.
And that seems to help out a lot as well.
OK, thanks.
I think we have a question from the
signal's angel is the
Internet is asking, do you see any
intentions from manufacturers to invest
in vector displays?
I don't think anyone is still making cuts
at all, much less, much less factory
displays.
In fact, even the vector displays are
getting fairly rare.
There's a lot of projects where folks are
trying to rewind the
the jokes on regular
monitors to see if they can use them
as vector displays. And it's been, you
know, kind of a hit or miss affair.
The the back nine game that Adele
mentioned was built with a
with a Wells
gardener monitor out of an asteroid's
cabinet that had died.
And at this point, you were pretty much
scavenging from what's out there.
So no more microphone questions
here. I know there's one right over
there.
One more question.
You're just using two gases,
so you are just controlling exabyte
channel or you're also controlling
the set.
We have four dacher channels,
and so we have both the
and offset voltage and the Z,
so on the back tracks you can
see that it is doing a bright
with that the demo, the running
here on the oscilloscope is
that's generating the brightness just by
controlling the line, drawing speed.
OK.
Signals Angel was another one or
that.
How was it?
OK, so left side microphone.
Well, not directly a question, but I just
wanted to note that it is possible to
use the PC, VGA input
output to drive an oscilloscope
vector so you
don't need external help where you can
essentially just wire the A channel to
the scope. So three channels X,
Y, Z, that gives
you eight bits of resolution.
Right. That's that's a hard limit there.
Yeah. But with these attacks,
we get 12 bits and it's
very the apitz, the stairstep
is very, very noticeable.
Um, another question from the signal's
angel.
We've got one more from the Internet.
What is the display rate like?
It depends.
OK, left side microphone.
You mentioned that you are working on
this board that, uh,
just makes it easier to use this, I guess
is how far you
like.
Producing this or selling this, or
how easy is it to make your own thing
like this?
Yeah, so
we had a workshop and I had a workshop at
NYC Resistor a few months ago where folks
just saw them together, it's pretty much
it's the teensy and the two tax.
There's not for oscilloscope
spectroscope in the back tracks.
You don't need really anything else.
So I don't see any more questions.
You said the session is going to be at
seven, 30 in 82.
That's correct.
Thank you very much. So could you
join me? And thank Trommel
Hudson and again.