Oscilloscope pong for 1 or 2 players.

[GK]

.... Cont.

[bitseeker]

Are you going to hang the finished "console" on the wall? It'd be cool right above whatever TV becomes the official Pong display device.

[GK]

Yeah, I have a computing corner in the shack with an empty bit of wall above the monitors.

[bitseeker]

Sweet!

[German_EE]

Totally cool!     

[GK]

Thanks 

Aside from a tackle box-style carry handle and the clear acrylic sheet cover, which I haven't ordered yet, the construction is 100% complete. Just working on the documentation and the final presentation now.

[bitseeker]

      

[fireworks]

  YouTube video, please ? 😀

[GK]

Still working on the video. I have this Samsung "BD-HDD Combo" Blue ray/DVD/Hard disk personal video recorder here at the moment for other reasons, and assumed that I'd be able to use this to record to the internal HDD the composite video output from my Pong machine directly, but as it turns out the composite video/audio jacks on the rear of this thing are outputs only. The stupid thing can only record from the internal digital TV tuner.  I have an old TEAC DTV tuner set-top box that will record MPEG video to a USB stick, but as per the Samsung box, from the DTV tuner only.

I would have thought that legacy support for the displaced analogue video would be reasonably well catered for in the modern digital "personal video recorder" market (for instance people needing/wanting to back-up their old VHS tapes/home videos) but all I can find so far, searching for personal video recorders with legacy composite video input(s) are references to no-name-brand PC adaptors which (from reading the available reviews) generally have crappy or sub-standard image quality and are plagued with flaky software.

In any case I'd be in the market for a modern DTV HDD PVR and it would be nice find one with legacy support in the form of a composite video input with companion stereo audio inputs from which it can actually record.

Does anyone reading have any experience here or can suggest a brand or model number that I can pick up at Harvey Norman or something? If not the quickest fix to get my Pong video recorded might be to drop into Jaycar to pick up one of these:   https://www.jaycar.com.au/usb-2-0-dvd-maker/p/XC4867

[GK]

Hmm, just checked to see if my Samsung TV, which has composite video inputs, has the ability to record to a USB stick or an external HDD. Ooh, there is a "record" button on the remote, which I've never payed attention to before. Woo Hoo! It does indeed! To both a USB stick and my external HDD. Looks like I don't need to buy a PVR to record DTV then, as I've effectively already got one in my TV. So then I selected the "AV" (composite video) input channel and pressed the record button - "function not available"  The F%$#ing TV has inputs for and can display a composite video signal, but it can't f%$^ing record it.
     

[John Heath]

I just caught the tail end of this thread. To GK my hat goes off to you. 1 percent of that build would drive me nuts. Well done. To keep ping pong score a Z80 CPU made of discrete  transistors ,, forget what I said as there is a chance you would do it.

[BrianHG]

First, all transistor vector based oscilloscope pong.
Second, all transistor based video pong.

Next?  Like I said in an earlier post, time for all transistor asteroids game, though this one will need at least something like 9 moving sprites, with wrap-around the borders instead of bounce, to look good unlike the current 1 ball + 2 paddles.  To simplify things, keep the spaceship in the center, just make it rotateable with firing and maybe a few seconds of shield with slow recharge, + maybe as much as 3 simultaneous bullets.  I guess if you want it simple, 1 bullet, which may be instantly reentered if shot again before going off the edge of the screen.

[Berni]

Sweet project

Asteroids would be pretty damn cool, but im pretty sure that would need to be mostly digital and that eats up transistors very quickly to the point of it being closer to a single purpose computer rather than analog. Perhaps a more simplified version of it could be done all analog where the rocks are circles and they don't split and collide with each other. I think most of the movement could be done with a pile of integrators and sample and holds. Collision detection could get quite involved tho.

[BrianHG]

Sweet project

Asteroids would be pretty damn cool, but im pretty sure that would need to be mostly digital and that eats up transistors very quickly to the point of it being closer to a single purpose computer rather than analog. Perhaps a more simplified version of it could be done all analog where the rocks are circles and they don't split and collide with each other. I think most of the movement could be done with a pile of integrators and sample and holds. Collision detection could get quite involved tho.

Your lacking imagination here.  3 small asteroids on-top of each other adjacently making 1 large one = 3 sprites with identical trajectories like having 3 pong balls in the current game.  The first fire collision breaks the 3 up by altering the trajectories of 1 or 2 of the 3 giving you the smaller object.  If you look at the ball's programmable x/y charge oscillator in the schematic, this would be multiplied by 3 for this task.  Multiply again by 3 to start with 3 large asteroids.  Window comparators to activate the pixels located at the proper coordinates during the output scan and use as collision detectors for the gun fire.  Everything which has already been done, though, GK will need to get a little more clever with the layout for space and change the bounce on some of the objects to mirrors to make the asteroids appear to fly off 1 side of the screen and appear on the other side.

[GK]

Maybe something like this is what you need. Note: I'm not recommending it, only suggesting. I've never used one.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/OZ-Capture-Card-Video-USB-2-0-VHS-to-DVD-Adapter-Converter-EasyCap-PC-PS3-XBOX/111044087624?epid=1191490822&hash=item19dabe4f48:g:ofgAAOSwdAxZbQYl

There appear to be cheaper options direct from China. But this one claims to be shipped from Sydney.

Yeah, that one of the USB dongle-like devices I mentioned in my other post. The problem is most of these are rubbish. I bought the one I linked to above from Jaycar this

afternoon. Follow the saga here:  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/kworld-dvd-maker-2-from-f$ing-jaycar/

HDD PVR's with record-able "AV" inputs now seem to be quite rare. The only model which I can find which is not listed as a discontinued product and is readily available off-the-shelf over here is Strong's SRT7014, but it's $400: 

https://strongaustralia.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/just-arrived-srt-7014-twin-tuner-digital-video-recorder-with-av-input-rs-232/

Looks like a nice unit overall though.


Sorry I can't reply to the other posts right now in a meaningful way as my "DVD Maker 2" woes have already eaten away more hours than I have to spare this evening.
 

[Berni]

I wouldn't be so worried about capturing the direct video from it.

If you fiddle with a camera for long enough you can get it to capture a CRT screen just fine. As long as the camera you have allows enough in the way of manual settings. Automatic settings tend to really hate CRTs.

[GK]

Yeah, my work Iphone 6s in 4k mode captures the screen fine without major strobing, but I would like to include a directly-recorded segment in my final video to demonstrate the panning stereo sound.

[NiHaoMike]

I vote for a composite/Svideo to HDMI converter plus a LKV373A HDMI streamer box. About $10-20 for a cheap but decent converter and $33 for the streamer. MsMadLemon uses a similar setup to capture retro video games.

[BrianHG]

2 additional possible options with equipment you may have on hand.

You can always capture the audio on you PC's line in, then use that audio to replace the audio of the iphone video.

If you have a laptop with a good enough built in webcam, and a stereo line input next to the headphone jack, you can record from that camera & use the line in instead of the microphone audio when recording the video.

[Kean]

Maybe GK can use a composite/Svideo to HDMI converter with his Samsung TV recording feature

[GK]

That was my immediate idea, just after reading NiHaoMike's post. Jaycar (LOL), which I drive past twice every weekday sell a composite video to HDMI converter. However having just checked my TV, annoyingly, as per the composite "AV" input, it won't record from the HDMI inputs either. It's internal "PVR" function operates with the DTV tuner only. There can't be a serious hardware reason for this. Why the sets firmware and recording functionality/usefulness should be purposefully crippled in this way I can only guess. 
 

[mikeselectricstuff]

That was my immediate idea, just after reading NiHaoMike's post. Jaycar (LOL), which I drive past twice every weekday sell a composite video to HDMI converter. However having just checked my TV, annoyingly, as per the composite "AV" input, it won't record from the HDMI inputs either. It's internal "PVR" function operates with the DTV tuner only. There can't be a serious hardware reason for this. Why the sets firmware and recording functionality/usefulness should be purposefully crippled in this way I can only guess.

There is a good hardware reason - for DTV it can simply copy the already-compressed DTV stream to disk.
For HDMI or composite it would need to compress it in realtime.

[GK]

That was my immediate idea, just after reading NiHaoMike's post. Jaycar (LOL), which I drive past twice every weekday sell a composite video to HDMI converter. However having just checked my TV, annoyingly, as per the composite "AV" input, it won't record from the HDMI inputs either. It's internal "PVR" function operates with the DTV tuner only. There can't be a serious hardware reason for this. Why the sets firmware and recording functionality/usefulness should be purposefully crippled in this way I can only guess.

There is a good hardware reason - for DTV it can simply copy the already-compressed DTV stream to disk.
For HDMI or composite it would need to compress it in realtime.

Which is just a codec/ASIC/chipset; pretty trivial these days AFAIK, but I guess my TV probably doesn't have one for reasons of economy, though it is a few years old already. It does have a lot of useless functionality that I'd happily trade for the ability to record from the external video inputs though.
   

[Berni]

Video encoding a lot different than decoding so it needs extra engineering work to make it happen too. Also it usually takes more processing power to encode video than it takes to decode it.

[BrianHG]

I truly wish I had a cheap capture option for you, but the truth is all those sub 50$ USB2.0 devices use the same garbage IC and if you read their customer reviews on Amazon, you will always find somewhere when someone connect these devices to an old gaming console which ran in 240p/262p progressive instead of 480i/525i, they freeze the image regularly and the audio is massively out of sync.

Unless you go for a name-brand device hoping that they use a completely different chipset, you might end up with the same problems.

If you can record stereo audio into your PC's Line In to your PC like my earlier suggestion, I am willing to swap the audio on your video file from your iPhone if you are unable to do this.