Movie Cart

[Supergun]

Mine arrived safely yesterday as well. Works great. (standard 4 switch console) Thank you rbairos. 

[+rbairos]

11 hours ago, RockLobster said:

So it SEEMS to be one...  BUT guess what, I fired it back up again and it had a problem until I changed it to read/write for everyone AGAIN even though the directory was already set.   I don't know what's going on.

 

https://streamable.com/ubr5gl

If you select another output location right off the bat, does it get created, or same issue?
Nice stream test! Very meta.


[EDIT:]  Seeing an unexpected error when I ran on an old office Mac that used to work. investigating..

[EDIT:]
I pushed a small change to the github (encoder.toe) that works around one unexpected floating point value coming out of the GPU on the 2013 Mac I tested on.
In my case it was stopping the file output altogether.

Want to see if that resolves the issue?  @RockLobster

 

[+rbairos]

11 hours ago, groundtrooper said:

So my MC arrived today. The bubble mailer didn’t fair very well but the PCB was safe and sound in the box. 
 

So I swapped out the stock sd card and replaced it with my Cinemax SW rip and popped the PCB in my 7800 and Booom! Amazing. And my Dragon’s Lair ripped also worked flawlessly. 
 

Thanks Rob for this amazing project. When I first saw it on ZPH I was in amazement but at the time it seemed very intimidating. But you evolved it nicely and made it pretty simple to do. I have a bunch of my movies ripped and sitting on a Plex server so I just needed Touch Designer to convert them to the movie cart format. 
 

Thanks again. I love this thing. And will likely grab a couple more down the road when everyone has had a shot to get their own. 
 

IMG_7067.mov

Good info on the bubble mailer. Very glad I use the multiple layers of protection (bubble mailer -> cardboard box -> anti-static bubble envelope).

Quality looks good. One small issue, I notice it's only showing one-half of the checkerboard. That might be an artifact of recording or playing back at 30fps, showing every other field.
My 2009 LCD does that as well, until I turn off and on its power, then I get the full interleaved fields.
You can tell quickly by hitting up/down on the joystick and seeing if the on screen menu fonts are fully intact or not.
Does it look fully formed live?

 

[+rbairos]

I've just pushed another change to encoder.toe that exposes the maximum gain on the Automatic Gain Control (audio section).
It really cranks up silence 100x so this might be causing artifacts for some scenes.
You can try reducing that 100 to something lower and keeping the AGC from going crazy.

 

[RockLobster]

1 hour ago, rbairos said:

I pushed a small change to the github (encoder.toe) that works around one unexpected floating point value coming out of the GPU on the 2013 Mac I tested on.
In my case it was stopping the file output altogether.

Want to see if that resolves the issue? 

Thanks I'll give it a try.

 

Do I just need to get a new copy of the file encoder.toe or also other support files?

[+rbairos]

1 minute ago, RockLobster said:

Thanks I'll give it a try.

 

Do I just need to get a new copy of the file encoder.toe or also other support files?

Just encoder.toe

[RockLobster]

13 minutes ago, rbairos said:

Just encoder.toe

THAT WAS IT!   THANK YOU!

 

Works every time now.  Before I had to restart, chmod, repeated the on/off several times to nudge it to go.   but now I can interrupt it, no restart, and it works every time.   

 

and yes I'm on a 2013 Mac Pro!

Edited May 17 by RockLobster

[+rbairos]

8 minutes ago, RockLobster said:

THAT WAS IT!   THANK YOU!

 

Works every time now.  Before I had to restart, chmod, repeated the on/off several times to nudge it to go.   but now I can interrupt it, no restart, and it works every time.   

 

and yes I'm on a 2013 Mac Pro!

Wow. Yaay!
Okay, so not sure what the problem is exactly, maybe a slight difference in GPUs or a bug in my shader code that only comes up in that machine, but its outputting a fractional background color for line 0, instead of an integer between 0..127, causing a line of python to choke converting to an integer, which I worked around.
Thanks for helping debug it.

 

[+sfish]

Wanting a second one. Planning to buy one this round, but I'm giving everyone a 30 minute head start.  

[eightbit]

On the topic of cutting the case for a microSD....

 

I received the Movie Cart today, thanks @rbairos!

 

I decided to take a different approach because it is important to me to both keep the movie cart sealed in a case and be able to easily access the card. Only the top half of the case (front label half) needs to be modified. This is how I did it if anyone is interested... and I have no complaints.

[+rbairos]

2 minutes ago, eightbit said:

 

 

 

That's really cool.
I'm really loving all these explorations in different areas.
 

[+sfish]

3 minutes ago, eightbit said:

On the topic of cutting the case for a microSD....

 

I received the Movie Cart today, thanks @rbairos!

 

I decided to take a different approach because it is important to me to both keep the movie cart sealed in a case and be able to easily access the card. Only the top half of the case (front label half) needs to be modified. This is how I did it if anyone is interested... and I have no complaints.

Nicely done! What tools did you use to carve out the semi-circle?

 

I'm waiting for my SD Card Extender to arrive. Once that's here, I'm going to try for a side slot using my recently-located Dremel. We'll see how successful I am.  

[eightbit]

1 minute ago, sfish said:

Nicely done! What tools did you use to carve out the semi-circle?

 

I'm waiting for my SD Card Extender to arrive. Once that's here, I'm going to try for a side slot using my recently-located Dremel. We'll see how successful I am.  

 

 

Just one tool. My good old Wen knock off dremel

 

When I purchased it YEARS ago it was $15, now its $19:

 

https://www.amazon.com/WEN-2305-Rotary-Tool-Shaft/dp/B003BYRFH8

 

Not meaning to advertise for it, but it's really darn good. Much better than my real dremel!

[+rbairos]

1 minute ago, eightbit said:

Just one tool. My good old Wen knock off dremel

What bit though?
The circle looks so clean and even.

[+Al_Nafuur]

finally I was able to place a order this time!

 

[eightbit]

5 minutes ago, rbairos said:

What bit though?
The circle looks so clean and even.

That one

 

I have become kind of good with the dremel tool over the years. I cut my teeth making Everdrive shells with this thing way back when those were being sold as board only

[+rbairos]

2 minutes ago, eightbit said:

That one

 

I have become kind of good with the dremel tool over the years. I cut my teeth making Everdrive shells with this thing way back when those were being sold as board only

 

I have 'that one'
Though nothing I make with it looks nearly as good. well done.

[4ever2600]

Nice clean job eightbit!  Very professional.

[+Neon Wraith]

I received the Movie Cart today and can't wait to test it. 😁  Thank you for this wonderful project @rbairos!

 

@eightbit great job with the Dremel tool.  I'll be doing a similar modification but I guarantee that mine won't look nearly that good.

[eightbit]

6 minutes ago, joeatari1 said:

I received the Movie Cart today and can't wait to test it. 😁  Thank you for this wonderful project @rbairos!

 

@eightbit great job with the Dremel tool.  I'll be doing a similar modification but I guarantee that mine won't look nearly that good.

 

Never doubt yourself Joseph-San!

[eightbit]

You know I just thought of something while sitting here listing to Night of the Living Dead. The sound is rather good.

 

Maybe an idea for a future project can be a "Music Cart". Then you can make full length cartridge music albums and have similar controls to pause, rewind, ff, play, seek, volume control, etc. 

 

Just a thought as the sound quality is pretty decent. Would be cool to make some Pink Floyd cartridge albums

[+Neon Wraith]

5 minutes ago, eightbit said:

You know I just thought of something while sitting here listing to Night of the Living Dead. The sound is rather good.

 

Maybe an idea for a future project can be a "Music Cart". Then you can make full length cartridge music albums and have similar controls to pause, rewind, ff, play, seek, volume control, etc. 

 

Just a thought as the sound quality is pretty decent. Would be cool to make some Pink Floyd cartridge albums

That's a cool idea too.  Could be fun programming a cart to do VLM style displays on the 2600.  Put your MP3s on the SD card and the Music Cart puts it through a VLM processor and displays on your screen.  Genius!  Make Jeff Minter proud!

[eightbit]

3 minutes ago, joeatari1 said:

That's a cool idea too.  Could be fun programming a cart to do VLM style displays on the 2600.  Put your MP3s on the SD card and the Music Cart puts it through a VLM processor and displays on your screen.  Genius!  Make Jeff Minter proud!

 

The original VLM:

 

[+sfish]

I can report the microSD Card extender works like a charm. It is not spring loaded, so there are no double-spring issues. It lays nice and flat against the bottom half of the cart case, so you should just be able to carve out the amount you need from the top and close everything up. 

[TrekMD]

That looks great!  I just received my SD card extender.  Glad to see it works!