OAK-U-TRON 201X (Oakland, California)

[akerfoot]

Hi,

I'm a life-long gamer and game developer and a huge fan of the Winnitron ever since I saw it at GDC last year.

I've also been working with Occupy Oakland. On Saturday, January 28th, Occupy Oakland is going to occupy a vacant building and turn it into a social center with room for a community kitchen, a first-aid station, meeting spaces, a free school, a space for children, a library, a media room, and more. There will also be a two-day long Oakland Rise Up Festival with music, movies, arts & crafts, food, and speakers during the opening weekend of the building. You can read more about the event on the Occupy Oakland Move-In Day site

For a while, I was trying to figure out how I could best use my skills to add to this event. When I heard that someone was planning to bring a pool table to the initial march to the building, mounted on wheels so it could be played while being pushed through the streets, I knew what I had to do. Every community center needs a game room to draw in the general public, to give people some respite and lighten spirits, and to give people an excuse to meet others in their community. And every good game room needs an arcade machine.

To that end we, RPM Collective, are constructing an arcade cabinet to be completed by the 28th and donated to Occupy Oakland. It will also be mounted on wheels and be able to run off a battery so that it is completely mobile and can be played in the streets during the march to the new space.

The plan is for the OAK-U-TRON 201X to be an official member of the Winnitron Indie Game Arcade Network, showcasing the true, independent, DIY spirit of game developers around the globe, mirroring the spirit of Occupy Oakland! Local Oakland indie game developer anna anthropy even signed on to create a (Winnitron-compliant) game to run on the arcade machine specifically for this event!

I'll take responsibility for maintaining the machine, and in the event that the Occupy Oakland isn't able to hold its space permanently, I will arrange for another local, publicly-accessible venue to host the machine until Occupy Oakland finds a permanent space.

You can read more about the motivations behind the project here: http://rpmcollective.com/2012/01/20/occupy-arcade/

And for anyone who wants to see another Winnitron in the world, the first one on the West Coast (of the Western Hemisphere), or the first Winnitron on Wheels can chip in a few bucks, or at least spread the word around, we've put out a call for donations, since we're doing this on a shoe-string budget, in record time, and our project was rejected by Kickstarter: http://rpmcollective.com/2012/01/21/oak-u-tron-201x-banned-from-kickstarter/

I'll be posting a status update from last Saturday soon, but I wanted to get this announcement out there first.

[akerfoot]

Screenshot Saturday!
 (basically reposted from here: http://rpmcollective.com/2012/01/23/screenshot-saturday-occucade/)

This Saturday, January 21st, marked the first day actual construction started on the OAK-U-TRON 201X. anna and daphny not only spent their time working on the new game developed specifically for the Occu-Tron, but also donated an empty arcade cabinet they had hanging around. Without this, I don't think it would be possible to have a working machine by Move-In Day on January 28th, so they deserve a lot of thanks!

After carrying the 250 lb. cabinet down five flights of stairs, through 2 elevators, over a fence, up an escalator, and around a merry-go-round, we threw it in the back of our rental truck. Luckily, the cabinet was exactly the length of the pickup bed, so we thanked the goddesses for our fortune and drove off.


Flying down the highway at 140 miles-per-hour to drop the cabinet of at Mars's shop and return our hourly-rental truck before it turned into a pumpkin took a bit out of us, so we spent a few minutes indoors trying to piece together a full computer from spare parts organized like a tub of assorted legos whose individual instruction books have long since been lost. The best CPU we managed to come by was a vintage 650GHz AMD Athalon from 1889. So we checked Craigslist before buzzing down to the infernal depths of Lower San Francisco to pick up a state-of-the-art HP D530 in the Small Form Factor Flavor, which you can see in the middle right, just beneath and to the right of the mustachioed Sega Saturn.


After having our fill of hardware issues, we decided to work on the hardware issues. Considering that the cabinet itself took up much of the room in the shop and the difficult involved in maneuvering it around and around it, we decided to start with the wheel cart. A scrap bed railing, cut in half and tied together with spare 2x6's provided an base, and four $2 two-inch casters provided the mobility.


Field testing determined that the cart was both sturdy and manueverable enough to try supporting the cabinet itself.


Like a geriatric gorilla with walker, once the cab was placed on its cart it could maneuver over most sidewalk features and ramps and could even make it up tiny driveway curbs, but it felt quite precarious on the 2-inch casters. Further development may be needed on this front, er... bottom.


A trimmed-down sheet of scrap MDF mounted with hinges provided a nice if unsightly front panel. The TV pictured here belonged to a craigslister from whom we decided not to buy it, but instead Mars bought a stereo from her so she threw the TV in for free.


In order to test the display's S-Video connection, we had to add another bleeding-edge component, this time a GeForce 4 Ti graphics card, imported from 2004 (3 years more advanced than the onboard HAL-9000 chip). The standard-sized graphics card required some intricate case-modding in order to fit in the small-form-factor case, but nothing we couldn't handle with the right tools.


Unfortunately, the only resolution our rig could muster over S-Video was 800x600, which might suffice for a MAME cabinet, but will not work for the Winnitron's standard resolution of 1024x768.

Then, after a productive day, I spend about 3 hours wrestling with legacy drivers to try to get any arcade emulator working over VGA using either the AGP card or the onboard chip, to no avail. Any time the program would try to change the display resolution, it would crash back to the desktop with no error message. Not sure if this problem is from running a new OS (Windows 7) on hardware so old that none of the drivers are supported, but I might just try wiping the machine and reinstalling XP to see if that fixes anything.

[akerfoot]

Sorry for neglecting updates, I've been pretty busy lately. That said, here's the rest of the stuff we did to get the OAK-U-TRON rolling:

PUN INTENDED.

We added bigger wheels, because the little casters were not up to the task of supporting the full cabinet:


We got a 19" LCD monitor off of craigslist, and built a mounting and bezel for it:


We added a front panel from some scrap wood, and built the temporary control panel with off-the-shelf fight sticks:


Added some melamine edging for detail:


The power source was the tricky part. We only had a day left and not much time to do research or even testing to find out how much power we would need, whether the waveforms would work, and other electric specification stuff. But I picked up an  inverter from an industrial supply store, and Mars picked up a deep-cycle battery from an auto shop. These are heavy-ass batteries, and he transported it home on the back of his rickety bike, which probably weighed less than the battery itself. This is NOT recommended.


We assembled the power supply at literally the eleventh hour on the night before the event. Then for the moment of truth:



IT WORKED!

Finally, we added a temporary marquee, to finish it off, and mugged in front of our creation:

[akerfoot]

So then, the big MOVE-IN DAY!

I wrote a much more in-depth story of the day on the RPM Collective blog, which I recommend reading, but here are some pretty visuals.

Here's the first game ever played on the OAK-U-TRON 201X:


Here's the cabinet amidst the 2000-or-so people who came out for the action (it's the red rectangle just underneath the BART sign [ba]):


Here's a link to a video of people playing on the OAK-U-TRON while it gets pushed along the streets (is there a way to embed video in this forum?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mokUMwB-jAg

Here's the Google Maps route that it travelled: http://g.co/maps/vs42r

And here it is being pushed just in front of its intended home:


There are more photos in the Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndesavage/sets/72157629098386439

The OAK-U-TRON 201X is currently residing at The Holdout, an organizing and events space in Oakland, temporarily until Occupy Oakland finally gets its social space. The Holdout just had their Grand Opening to the public this last Saturday, and people were lining up to play the game. Everyone loved it!

[akerfoot]

Oh, and anna anthropy made a brilliant game, KEEP ME OCCUPIED, specifically for the event. It fit the setting so well, and I think it's one of her strongest games to date (but I am kind of partial).

Oh did I mention she made the game in less than two weeks, and we constructed the working cabinet in a single week? A GREAT BIG THANKS is due to everyone who helped us out along the way!

[Ciro Continisio]

Cool initiative, guys! I was following the whole thing from Twitter, Anna was tweeting like crazy!
And it's awesome that you made everything in a bunch of days!