Skip navigation.

exploreopera

| Help

Sign up | Help

Opera Widget Arcade

A project by Opera Desktop Team

Posts tagged with "Arjan"

avatar

Second Coat

, , , ...

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.
avatar

Priming

, , , ...

Priming the cabinet Before painting, the cabined needed to be primed. The layer of primer prevents the paint from absorbing into the pores of wood and drying too fast, and also doesn't let the natural color of the wood shine through the paint.

This February, a new member joined our desktop team, so far as an intern but we hope he'll stay with us after he graduates. Not only has Alexander taken a head start in work, but he also has joined our teambuilding activity! Together with Arjan, Adam and Per Arne, he helped sand the surfaces of the cabinet so that they became smooth. After that, the team covered the cabinet with a layer of primer.

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

Preparing for Painting

, , ,

Patching the screw holes Our Opera Widget Arcade project is close to completion. The machine works, and people from other departments come to play once in a while. The only big thing left is making it look nice.

Because of the way the cabinet is assembled, the side walls have a lot of screws in them holding the front and back panels as well as various inner shelves. Before painting the side walls, these holes had to be leveled. On Tuesday, Per Arne, Adam and Arjan covered all the screwholes with pieces of paper and painted over them with primer.

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

Putting It All Together

, , , ...

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.
avatar

More Controller Board Contsruction

, , , ...

Cutting the trackball slot We've made a great progress on Monday, but the holes for buttons and the trackball were too deep for them to sit nicely. We needed to make grooves in the wooden panel where the buttons and trackball would be mounted. To carve out the grooves, we used a wood router. It was easy with the button holes, but the large figured slot for the trackball took a lot of time and effort: George, Arjan, Adam and Per Arne took turns at cutting the wood. Finally, we had a nice controller panel where all the buttons and the trackball would fit perfectly.

Assembling the controller board The controller hardware we chose is X-Arcade, known for their indestructible buttons and joysticks. They offer a full range of products up to a complete arcade machine, but we're building our own, right? That's why we went for the Build Your Own Arcade Kit (two joysticks, a bunch of buttons, and a controller PCB that emulates a PS/2 or USB keyboard) and a 3" Arcade Trackball Mouse Assembly (a trackball unit and a few buttons). At last two links you'll find pictures, descriptions and PDF manuals for those who are interested in building their own arcade machine.

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

Controller Board Construction

, , , ...

Working on the controller board design Most of the other parts of the arcade machine were done, so on Monday it was time to work on the gaming controls. Huib and Adam designed the layout of the controller board in Google SketchUp, a 3D editor available free of charge for Mac and Windows. You can download our design in this editor's own format, but we've also converted it for you to a bunch of popular 3D (3DS Max, DXF, VRML) and 2D (PDF, JPEG) formats.

We decided that our controller board would have a trackball in the middle (it's a modern arcade that can browse the web, too!) and two joysticks, one for each player. On each player's side, there would be a set of buttons:
Controller board blueprint
  • Four general purpose gaming buttons
  • A Start button
  • One of the mouse buttons that work together with the trackball
  • Pause button on the left side and exit button on the right
There would also be an extra gaming button on each of the sides of the cabinet for pinball games.

The top view of the controller board layout has been printed out to guide us when making the board. Adam drilled the holes for buttons and joysticks and cut the big hole for the trackball with the hole saw.

Also, Arjan and Adam made some parts of the cabinet really smooth with the help of sanding paper.

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

Installing the Speakers

, ,

Cutting the speaker holes with a hole saw Hello again! We didn't do really much on Wednesday, but what we did was an important part: we installed the sound system into the cabinet.

Our sound system consists of an amplifier unit combinet with a subwoofer, two speakers, and a volume control on a wire that came in handy because we could put it on the keyboard shelf. We put the main unit in the bottom part of the cabinet.

For the speakers, Arjan and Adam made two openings in the ceiling sheet above the monitor with a hole saw. The speakers turned out to be exactly the right size for the tight space between the ceiling sheet and the top of the cabinet: were they just a little bigger, and they wouldn't fit.

Speakers resting on the inner top sheet When it was done, we had to test the sound. We moved the arcade to the middle of the room and connected the sound system to Adam's Mac. Of course, Adam started the original Galaga game in an emulator, so the sound test was very authentic. The monitor wasn't showing anything yet, but the sounds our box made were the true sounds that a video game is supposed to make!

There will be more reports as we go on with our project.

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

Assembling the Cabinet

, , , ...

Drilling assembly holes This Monday, we have finished the assembly of the arcade cabinet!

Adam and George started by reassembling the cabinet that has been dismantled for transportation. Then Arjan, Petter and George drilled assembly holes in the parts such as the front keyboard door and the monitor frame. Adam put in four stop screws to hold the monitor in place.

Marking up the door sheet Most employees in Opera have switched to LCD screens a long time ago, and returned their old CRT monitors to the system administrators. For most part, nobody wants them, so we helped the environment a little by reusing one of these devices. Of course, an arcade has to feature a CRT screen to be truly authentic! We've used a white monitor for initial measurements, but decided to replace it with an otherwise identical black and silver one. Adam and Espen put the chosen monitor in place, and after the remaining parts were screwed to the chassis, the entire thing started looking really like a proper video game!

More reports on what we do next are coming.

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

Building the Arcade Cabinet

, , , ...

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.
avatar

Off we go!

, , , ...

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!