Movie Cart

[+-^CrossBow^-]

3 hours ago, Atari_Warlord said:

Tron turns out to be a real gem on this.  The graphics pop nicely and look surprisingly good.

 

I was wondering if it could handle multiple movie files on the sd card so tried it this morning.  The answer is no.  It appears to pick the first file copied to the card or the oldest dated file, it didn't use alphabetical order to choose.  It also jumped back to the beginning of the movie at about half way through.  I was able to fast forward past the point and continue, but it seems one at a time is the best way.

The way I'm handling multiple movies,  is that I created a separate folder on the SD card to store the movie files into.  That way I can swap out the movie I want to watch to the root of the SD card.  That is another reason why I wanted the SD card to be more easily accessed. The extender that @sfish posted,  works great for that. 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

14 hours ago, Phylax said:

Not sure if this was already discussed, but an observation I just had:

 

I put my moviecart in a donor shell, only to notice that it wouldn’t insert fully into the 2600 once assembled. Maybe I assembled it wrong? No big issue, just open the donor cart again, right? Well, opening it was 10 times harder than the first time, and it seems like the culprit is the PCB! Since it is as wide as the shell, it does not allow the plastic tabs on the side to flex while trying to pry it open. Lesson learned! I think I won’t reassemble it until I’m reasonably sure I won’t need to open it again! 

I used an old pac man cartridge for one and a combat for the other and they both fit exactly in the nose like the original pcbs did? Are you using an actual atari 2600 shell? I even have the dust doors installed on them which,  I do think helps with alignment in the slot.

 

My movie cart pcbs have a little bit of give on either side when in the shell so the tabs on the sides snap in easy. The only issue I had with both of my carts is that the center hole in the pcb has no tolerance and I did have to use a round file to remove a tiny bit of material so that the cart shells would snap together properly. But in my case again it was only the center hole was a little too tight. 

Edited May 30 by -^CrossBow^-
Because replying from my phone sucks

[+rbairos]

14 hours ago, Phylax said:

Not sure if this was already discussed, but an observation I just had:

 

I put my moviecart in a donor shell, only to notice that it wouldn’t insert fully into the 2600 once assembled. Maybe I assembled it wrong? No big issue, just open the donor cart again, right? Well, opening it was 10 times harder than the first time, and it seems like the culprit is the PCB! Since it is as wide as the shell, it does not allow the plastic tabs on the side to flex while trying to pry it open. Lesson learned! I think I won’t reassemble it until I’m reasonably sure I won’t need to open it again! 

Sorry to hear that.
What type of donor shell was it? Ive done it about a dozen or two times without issue so far, but I just use combat shells and other games from that specific time.

Which tabs are an issue?

Here's a pic of it inserted:

 

[+rbairos]

2 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

The only issue I had with both of my cats is that the center hike in the pcb has no tolerance and I did have to use a round file to remove a tiny bit of material so that the cart shells would snap together properly. But in my case again it was only the center hole was a little too tight. 

Ah, those center holes caused me a bit of grief.
I originally had them made a 1/4" exactly.
First batch came out great, second batch required me manually filing / drilling the whole lot, testing against a combat cart.

Next batch is 1/64th wider at  17/64th of an inch, which I think is the proper size. (Moved the traces a smidgen away as well to compensate).
I could go bigger, but I think snug gives more reliable cartridge insertion without play.

 

[+rbairos]

6 hours ago, Atari_Warlord said:

Tron turns out to be a real gem on this.  The graphics pop nicely and look surprisingly good.

 

I was wondering if it could handle multiple movie files on the sd card so tried it this morning.  The answer is no.  It appears to pick the first file copied to the card or the oldest dated file, it didn't use alphabetical order to choose.  It also jumped back to the beginning of the movie at about half way through.  I was able to fast forward past the point and continue, but it seems one at a time is the best way.

Oh, it resets half way through? I have not seen this before.
Are you using the supplied card? (FAT32 formatted).
Does it always do that?  If you zip and send me the file I can try and reproduce.
One limitation under the simple FAT32 file system is that file sizes greater than 4GB aren't supported, though I assume your movie isn't more than 4 or 5 hours?

EDIT: Wild guess, but if you format the card and recopy the file, does it still reset half way through?
 

[+rbairos]

On 5/29/2024 at 9:04 AM, -^CrossBow^- said:

 

 

@Atari_Warlord I can also concur that darker scenes can be problematic for sure. Runaway has more than a few dark scenes since most of the movie seems to take place at night. But in the end and from a distance, I can still tell what is going on. If you are willing to edit the video for those scenes, you can increase the gamma through Touchdesigner using the record function so it knowns when to increase it and bring it back down to help with scenes like that. I've not really bothered too much. I think for Runaway I actually just set the gamma to 1.12 or something like that and encoded the entire thing set that way. 

 

On quality output overall, I actually took a movie that I made my own 4:3 cropped version of, and redid it both through Vega Studio and Handbrake. Handbrake made the video smaller in size at only like 7GB vs the 13GB from Vegas studio. Through VLC I could see a clear quality difference in the video. But... when I ran them through Touchdesigner to be encoded for 2600 Movie cart use, both videos came out at exactly the same size (1.3gb) and looked the same to me through the Movie cart playback on the consoles. So that is another reason that I don't know that getting the highest quality to start with is really going to make much of a difference here given how reduced it all ends up being on the Movie cart anyway.

 

Yah agreed.
Movie is uncompressed so the filesize is directly correlated to the length and nothing else.
It reduces it down to 80x192 so pretty much any original format will do.
Just make sure it's clear and not a bad grainy dim hand held camera bootleg cut for example.

For dark scenes you can:
1) Use an external movie editor, which have some great advanced features for auto adjusting color.
2) Manually adjust the gamma and brightness sliders while its recording  (TouchDesigner)
3) Use the record feature over the parts you want manually adjusted (TouchDesigner) to not have to monitor the whole time.
 

[+Atari_Warlord]

20 minutes ago, rbairos said:

Oh, it resets half way through? I have not seen this before.
Are you using the supplied card? (FAT32 formatted).
Does it always do that?  If you zip and send me the file I can try and reproduce.
One limitation under the simple FAT32 file system is that file sizes greater than 4GB aren't supported, though I assume your movie isn't more than 4 or 5 hours?

EDIT: Wild guess, but if you format the card and recopy the file, does it still reset half way through?
 

Yes, I was using the supplied SD card.  It was Raiders of the Lost Ark.  My assumption was that having two files in the root directory might have caused the issue.  Let me try Raiders by itself and see what happens.

 

[Phylax]

3 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

I used an old pac man cartridge for one and a combat for the other and they both fit exactly in the nose like the original pcbs did? Are you using an actual atari 2600 shell? I even have the dust doors installed on them which,  I do think helps with alignment in the slot.

 

My movie cart pcbs have a little bit of give on either side when in the shell so the tabs on the sides snap in easy. The only issue I had with both of my carts is that the center hole in the pcb has no tolerance and I did have to use a round file to remove a tiny bit of material so that the cart shells would snap together properly. But in my case again it was only the center hole was a little too tight. 

The Moviecart PCB fits fine, it’s just that the PCB’s edges are basically flush with tabs at the top so they don’t really have a chance to flex inwards without additional force. In the end I was able to open it again, but won’t try reassembly until I’ve cut out those top two tabs. 

 

25 minutes ago, rbairos said:

Sorry to hear that.
What type of donor shell was it? Ive done it about a dozen or two times without issue so far, but I just use combat shells and other games from that specific time.

Which tabs are an issue?

Here's a pic of it inserted:

 

It’s an extra Pac-Man shell I had. The only difference in my shell from most others I’ve seen is that the spring mechanism for the connector cover was two springs around poles rather than the one X-shaped spring. Maybe it’s slightly smaller? But like I said, the PCB does still fit well. 

[+Atari_Warlord]

5 hours ago, rbairos said:

Oh, it resets half way through? I have not seen this before.
Are you using the supplied card? (FAT32 formatted).
Does it always do that?  If you zip and send me the file I can try and reproduce.
One limitation under the simple FAT32 file system is that file sizes greater than 4GB aren't supported, though I assume your movie isn't more than 4 or 5 hours?

EDIT: Wild guess, but if you format the card and recopy the file, does it still reset half way through?
 

 

I believe the Raiders file had an error when I created the MVC.  I accidentally bumped the mouse button which stopped the encoding.  I thought I made it start over, but I believe it just added on to the partial file.  I've recreated the file from scratch with the same parameters and it is about 30% smaller.

 

[+rbairos]

2 hours ago, Atari_Warlord said:

 

I believe the Raiders file had an error when I created the MVC.  I accidentally bumped the mouse button which stopped the encoding.  I thought I made it start over, but I believe it just added on to the partial file.  I've recreated the file from scratch with the same parameters and it is about 30% smaller.

 

Ah good info.
One thing I like to do, is play the resulting MVC file in Gopher (or stella 7.x) and just fast forward the whole way through to make sure it all got captured.
Thanks for the followup.

[+Atari_Warlord]

I was interested in printing the manual out and had a couple questions:

 

1.  It mentions plugging both joysticks in, does the right one do anything?

 

2.  Is there a non-movie specific version available?

 

[+rbairos]

2 hours ago, Atari_Warlord said:

I was interested in printing the manual out and had a couple questions:

 

1.  It mentions plugging both joysticks in, does the right one do anything?

 

2.  Is there a non-movie specific version available?

 

 

That's kinday funny.
If I mentioned plugging both in when I made those, it was only to follow the original combat instructions more closely.  The right one has no effect in movie cart.
I can dig around and look for my original files this weekend, thought it's been a while.  Ping me if I forget.
 

[+Al_Nafuur]

Arrived today:

Fits nicely into @Sikor's case (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/315756-new-injection-mold-atari-26007800-cases/?do=findComment&comment=4929821

 

@rbairos is the movie on the SD-Card NTSC, PAL or both?

 

 

[+rbairos]

41 minutes ago, Al_Nafuur said:

 

 

@rbairos is the movie on the SD-Card NTSC, PAL or both?

 

 

Depends what you ordered.
But here are all the versions:  (ntsc / pal / pal60 / secam) if you want to swap it:

https://github.com/lodefmode/moviecart/blob/main/docs/How_To_Update_Content.txt
 

[+bent_pin]

Are there any available currently?

[5x7]

I found an auction seller with a load of Combat carts for 88 cents each plus shipping. I have other bare boards to enclose as well as the Movie  cart. 
 

The board went in great. I put a small slot in the cart for the SD. I trimmed the width of both the main and end labels and rounded the corners. It turned out great.

If anyone encodes copyright free movies and can put them on a file share, it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for doing this great project!

[livingonwheels]

What audio settings is everyone using during the conversion process? My audio is always so scratchy (lots of background hiss) unlike the movie that was included with the cart.

Edited May 31 by livingonwheels

[+rbairos]

3 hours ago, livingonwheels said:

What audio settings is everyone using during the conversion process? My audio is always so scratchy (lots of background hiss) unlike the movie that was included with the cart.

Try turning off Error Diffusion.

It was something I added late in the game.  It trades resolution for noise basically.  Similar to visual banding being broken up by random speckle in old images.

Let me know if you prefer that. Perhaps I should make it default off or even  less pronounced.

 

[+rbairos]

7 hours ago, Al_Nafuur said:

Arrived today:

Fits nicely into @Sikor's case (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/315756-new-injection-mold-atari-26007800-cases/?do=findComment&comment=4929821

@rbairos

 

Do you think he's still making lots? 

Shipping from Poland? Might be an issue but seems like something people might want moving forward

[+Al_Nafuur]

9 minutes ago, rbairos said:

Do you think he's still making lots? 

Shipping from Poland? Might be an issue but seems like something people might want moving forward

I just recently bought a load of black cases from him for the PlusCarts I am selling.

[+rbairos]

16 hours ago, bent_pin said:

Are there any available currently?

Getting another batch prepared so a week or two max Im hoping.

[+bent_pin]

Cool, ty

[+rbairos]

14 hours ago, livingonwheels said:

What audio settings is everyone using during the conversion process? My audio is always so scratchy (lots of background hiss) unlike the movie that was included with the cart.

I just changed the default on the github encoder.toe Error Diffusion from 1.0 to 0.25
That should help with the hiss.
The hiss actually masks the artifacts you here when listening to quiet scenes, but I also employ some automatic gain control so that's not as prevalent.
 

[+rbairos]

On 5/31/2024 at 6:28 AM, Atari_Warlord said:

I was interested in printing the manual out and had a couple questions:

 

1.  It mentions plugging both joysticks in, does the right one do anything?

 

2.  Is there a non-movie specific version available?

 

I found my old files, but its mostly a mishmash of screen-grabs, jpgs and artwork I found.
What are you looking for exactly?
Cheers

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Not sure there is a large difference here but it is subtle to me. I actually prefer to set the diffusion level to 0 on my encodes. Here are two captures directly from my 7800 via s-video of Bad Apple. First is the diffusion level set to .25 and the second one is diffusion set to 0 (zero).

 

 

Audio diffusion set to 0 (Zero)