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Opera Widget Arcade

A project by Opera Desktop Team

Posts tagged with "Anders"

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Second Coat

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Painting the cabinet Almost the entire team gathered together on Friday to add the final strokes to the arcade machine. George, Anders, Adam, Arjan and Alexander all worked together to finish the surface of the cabinet with the second layer of paint.

Some parts, like the keyboard door, were painted separately and reattached to the cabinet the next day, when the paint dried off. The machine stands in the Desktop Team office now, it's finished, and it helps us have these nice litte breaks while our code is compiling. We also want to make it look even cooler by adding some artwork, but more about that later.

Note: All hyperlinks in this post take you to more pictures. You can also view all the pictures from this event.
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First Coat

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Fresh-painted cabinet It was time to cover the cabinet with actual paint! To make a mockup of how we want to paint the cabinet, we used Google SketchUp again. You can download our design in this editor's own format or in 3DS Max, VRML, PDF, or JPEG formats. The desiggn features Opera's brand colors, red and black.

On Thursday, Anders, Adam and other members of the team covered the cabinet with the first layer of paint. The machine was starting to look great!

Note: All hyperlinks in this post take you to more pictures. You can also view all the pictures from this event.
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Putting It All Together

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Assembling the controller board On Wednesday, we moved on with our controller board construction. Adam and Arjan did all the interconnections between the controller board components. The PCB connects to both joysticks (they have one microswitch for each of the four directions) and to most of the buttons according to the assembly manual; it also plugs into the computer and acts as a USB keyboard. The trackball connects to the buttons that do left and right mouse clicks (those are in the top-left and top-right corners on our controller panel); the computer regards it as a USB mouse.

Computer installed in the cabinet Adam screwed the joystics and the trackball to the controller panel. He also drilled holes in the sides of the cabinet for pinball flipper puttons, and installed buttons into the holes. In the back wall of the cabinet, Anders and Adam cut two holes with the jigsaw and mounted a power switch and an Ethernet socket. Later we'll run the power and network lines through these, but for now we just connected the hardware through the open back door.

Meanwhile, Anders installed a computer inside the cabinet, connected the monitor, keyboard and the speakers, and powered the system up. For the first time, the screen of the arcade machine went up! Julien installed and configured the operating system.

Note: All hyperlinks in this post take you to more pictures. You can also view all the pictures from this event.
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Building the Arcade Cabinet

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Construction team at work So it happened! We've had our first arcade-building session at George's place.

First thing in the morning, Adam and George went shopping and brought a full car of materials. For the cabinet walls, we got three MDF sheets which we had to wipe dry first because they got wet outside.

As soon as everyone came, we did some planning, converted all sizes on the plans to millimeters (yes, we all think metric; measuring in inches for us is like measuring in TV screens), and decided what to cut and in what order. Then we went to the garage where all the actual building happened.

Cutting straight parts of the profile with a circular saw The most important part was to mark up the complex side wall shape on the MDF sheet; it's less spectacular than actual sawing but more crucial. For the curved parts of the shape, Anders and Per Arne used a piece of string as compasses. Adam and Arjan used a jigsaw to cut the curved parts of the profile and a circular saw for the straight lines. The other side of the cabinet was easier because we could use the first one as a template for our mark-up.

Meanwhile, George cut several wooden strips with a cross-cut saw and put them together to make the bottom frame for the cabinet. He drilled some holes in it for the screws and assembled a box-like structure with a shelf for the keyboard (you'll see later where it ends up in the assembly).

Partly assembled cabinet with the monitor installed After that, we cut the remaining MDF sheet to make all the other parts. We've finished the edges of the parts with a sander to correct the unevenness of cuts. Then we put everything together to see how it fits, and for the very first time we were looking at something that resembles an arcade!

Finally, the cabinet was disassembled and brought into the Opera Oslo office where the game will stay. Bear with us, more reports on our construction efforts are coming!

Note: All hyperlinks in this post take you to more pictures. You can also view all the pictures from this event.
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Off we go!

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Hi, this is Desktop Team in Opera Software! Every day we work to make the web browser that (we hope) you're using faster, safer, and handier for use. But that is, of course, not the only thing we do. We have fun, too! Other departments have Wii game consoles and whatnot in their sections of the office, but hey, you can buy a Wii in a shop near you, so we decided to make something unique: the Opera Widget Arcade!

The idea is essentially to build an old-style video game machine that you might remember from the eighties: tall fancy-painted cabinet, a computer screen deep inside, joystick controls, and games with low-res graphics but thrilling gameplay. Of course, we wouldn't have one of those authentic game boards inside, but hey, in Opera we have our own platform that's quite good for games: Opera Widgets! So be it Opera Widget Arcade, an entertainment machine with 180-in-1 games and counting. Maybe we'll also run some of the video game oldies in an emulator.

Galaga video game For the cabinet, we decided to go for the design of the famous Galaga series and replicate the original Midway's design as closely as possible (however, the artwork will be our own). Luckily, we've found a collection of original cabinet plans of many popular video games to choose from.

Front view

Inside the cabinet, we'll have a modern computer running Opera with tons of widgets, and a special shell allowing selection of games without a keyboard. The controls will also be fancier than the ones used in the original arcade, so that we can run a wider range of games. We have some cool ideas, but you'll read about it in the oncoming posts. When the machine is ready, we'll put it in the Desktop Team lounge and have other departments buy us beer in exchange for playing! :-)

For our team, this is a teambuilding activity, so everyone is involved on some part of the project. Here we go:

I'll be telling you about everything we do on this project, and many pictures will follow. Stay with us!