By feldgendler. Monday, 21. January 2008, 20:00:00
organization, controller, Huib, Arjan
...
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:
- 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.
By feldgendler. Tuesday, 1. January 2008, 12:00:00
Espen, organization, Julien, Huib
...
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.
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.
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:
- Main cabinet construction, controller mounting: Adam, George, Petter, Arjan, Patricia, Per Arne.
- Controller board with joysticks, buttons and wiring: Huib, Adam.
- Hardware: Espen, Anders.
- Software: Julien, Karianne, Alexander.
- Artwork: Petter.
- Photo blog: Alexey.
- Organization and planning: Adam, Arjan.
I'll be telling you about everything we do on this project, and many
pictures will follow. Stay with us!
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