Be Excellent To Each Other

Hey! I couldn't find a reasonably priced Vectrex, so I found a new solution. :P

Check out my latest invention - it's a home arcade console that uses a -vector graphics- display!



Here's a totally real advert from the totally real year of 199X.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBtuDdRtv20

It doesn't have blackjack nor hookers, but it has a 3D-fly-into-the-screen space game with a talking animal and a 2D arcade shooter with a triangular ship and floating rocks.

https://www.mrdictionary.net/ocelot

That is impressive stuff!

I don't really understand how much of that works, but that is bloody cool. Is that literally a standard, stolen-from-an-A-level-physics-lab oscillator?

Amazing!

This explains the basic principles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag


Oh yeah! Just a regular old background-of-the-science-lab-set oscilloscope. It's actually from an old observatory less than a mile from my house. It found its way to the local maker club DoES Liverpool and then they didn't want it any more so they offered it to me when I started making prototype vector experiments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8xk6ZDk-y4

Totally brilliant stuff! Very impressive. Is there a build log?

Brilliant stuff! Would love to see it in real life. Bring it to Cottage: looks like a more advanced display than the TV they've got.

I liked your advert, although initially I thought it was a hoax as I've been watching a lot of Mr Biffo lately and the style reminded me of his oeuvre.

Thanks! :D And this oscilloscopes on its last legs, I ran it a couple of miles in a knackered 30 year old rumbly rattley shopping carrier and it definitely didn't thank me for that.

And yeah I wanted it to straddle the line between real and fake. It doesn't help that my plywood laser cut case doesn't look at all real! I wanted to add in some more action shots of me plugging in the leads in the side, but I couldn't make it look not-terrible.

This is what my room looked like while filming the screen to get the gameplay clips.
https://i.imgur.com/t8WeNfO.jpg

It's a miracle that the fancy promo pictures at the start and the end turned out so well. It looks like I used a diffuser and had a proper backdrop set up and everything.

To take them, I put my room in complete darkness and set the Ocelot on a backdrop made out of two pieces of black card taped together; DSLR on that same tripod there.

In lieu of a thousand pounds worth of lighting equipment, I got a little angle-poise desk lamp (which currently lives under my bed wrapped in a bin bag) and waved it around my head a few times while shining it at the ceiling.

I put all the work in progress pictures in one place and annotated them at last!
http://www.mrdictionary.net/ocelot/wippics/
Contains a super sneak preview of the Ocelot's board schematic! (which will be useless to anybody who's unfamiliar with electronics because it's not very informative other than telling you there are some things on a board, and useless to anybody who is familiar with electronics because it's super simple and doesn't do anything remarkable at all!)

Fantastic work.