Work continues on Bill Paxton Pinball – the longest suffering Ben Heckendorn project of all time. The unit now has legs, a functioning input/output controller, tilt sensor, power supplies, fuses, front coin door panel, plunger assembly, start button, sound amplifier and some temporary targets.
Check out the video after the break!
Click here for a close-up of the wand
It has come to my attention that the Tucker Max movie “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” has come out. Last year I was approached by that movie’s prop department to come up with a “highly customized Xbox 360 controller for a game-obsessed character.”
Above you can see the result. It didn’t have to actually function but I insisted it did. I actually built 2 of them since movies always have backup props (well, mine don’t). The idea was the controller had a lot of “business” potential – that is to say the character could move around it with and act out functions in an overstated manner.
Having not seen the movie, my question is “Did it make it into the final cut?” Please let me know, I am curious!
The “pitch drawing” I sent them to get the gig.
Fun fact: the cost of these props exceed that of Possumus Woman’s entire budget.
Click here for larger version.
Last month I ran out and bought one of the new PS3 Slim consoles. You can check out my “tear down” of the unit here.
I had some other projects to finish first at the time, but now I’ve gotten around to building a laptop out of this thing. It might still be my fastest project of a new console, I think the Wii was 2 months after launch, this is about 35 days.
Anyway, specs:
Click here for larger version.
For the “Making Of” story, pics and video see below.
When I was young I used to do a lot of BASIC programming on my Atari 800 computer. Many years later I got an SIO2PC cable from eBay, which allows you to use your PC as a virtual disk drive with an old Atari. This allows a person to make disk images of their old stuff. Knowing how fragile the old FM disks were, I was excited to make backups.
Sadly, about 3 minutes after getting the transfer cable my 810 drive conked out. However recently a customer found me a working 1050 drive at a thrift store (how come thrift stores in Wisconsin aren’t that cool?) so once again I can share these old games with the world!
If you ever wondered what the “amazing” Ben Heck was doing at age 11, now you can find out! Though a programmed a lot of stuff, I’m only including what is complete or fairly playable.
Should run on most modern emulators, or a real Atari if you have an SIO2PC cable. Enjoy!
Here’s a new controller I put together for a customer. It doesn’t have a fancy case but went together pretty quickly, kind of like the Guitar Hero drum pedal puff switch. (Well, not as quickly as that one, but faster than most)
To see some more pics that may inspire you to mod a controller of your own, see below.
Thanks to Michael Bonkowski – the person who commissioned the Atari 800 laptop – I now have an Atari 1050 disk drive!
As some of you may know the Atari 800 was my first computer at age 11 (myself, not the computer). Sure even then it was fairly old, but still awesome. Over the years I programmed (or tried to program) many a game for it in BASIC. While the hobby never really accomplished much at the time, I give the experience a lot of credit for the computer knowledge I have today.
Several years ago I bought an SIO2PC cable, which allows you to hook up your Atari to a PC and use the PC as a virtual disk drive. You can play disk images off your PC, or make images of your original floppies. That was all well and good, but my Atari 810 disk drive failed shortly after getting this cable. So I didn’t manage to copy much.
But now thanks to Michael I can finally back up those old disks and realize just many games I never finished! However what was somewhat complete or playable has been made into ATR disk images and you can check them out here.
Should be good for a laugh, enjoy!
We’re back! In this exciting episode we discuss Wisconsin’s dowloadable content tax (lame), The Beatles Rock Band (awesome) and new upcoming games this fall and spring (numerous).