All posts by benheck

Port Washington “Making Of” page in progress

In order to pump people up for the inevitable release of Port Washington I have begun work on a “Port Washington Making Of” page. This covers the entire process, from idea to screenplay to storyboards to filming to effects. If you’re curious about low-budget filmmaking, PW or movies in general it might be of interest. Sure, some of this stuff will be on the DVD, but that’s not out yet!

The first 2 articles and a video are up now, and I hope to get the rest online before mid-February. Enjoy!

Oh, I also found enough case parts to build 1 more CNC SNES portable. If interested, click the Buy Portables link on the left for details.

Port Washington (The Movie) nearing completion

As of this writing we’ve been actively working on Port Washington for 3 years and 11 days. Granted it hasn’t been a solid working 3 years as I took 3 months off from it in 2003 (to make portables and take a break) and 6 months off last year (to write my book) but still… a long time.

And now it’s actually almost done. All the shots are filmed, all the visual FX are done and almost all of the audio is in place. All that remains is the musical score and a bit of looping…

If you’d like to read more about this and other film projects I’ve worked on check out the Movies section by linking the link to your left. Lizard of Death is already available on DVD and hopefully I’ll get The Adventure Double Pack (Both of my “Adventure” movies on 1 DVD – what a deal!) ready soon as well.

Dum dum da…. The Vagabond 2000

Man, what a pain! For difficulty this rivaled that pesky PS2p I built… though to be fair a lot of it was my own fault. First I routed 50% of the case wrong, then I fried some LED’s, then I toasted and had to replace the TIA, but I finally got it done:

        

Yes, an amazing spring-loaded flip-up screen! Flip it up and sunlight (or lamplight, candlelight, glowing toxic waste etc…) bounces off a reflector and illuminates the screen. Click it down and the standard white LED’s kick it and light it traditionally. Either way you can’t loose! (Unless you drop it on concrete, then it’s probably doomed)

 This was a feature I envisioned over 4 years ago for a portable Atari but only now did I manage to squirt it out. For the whole story on this things long history and how it was built click here.

Happy New Year!

Well, another year! As of now I’ve been doing this portable stuff for 5 years! I recall this because it was New Year’s 1999 when I first had the notion of making a portable Atari.

So, in sort-of honor of this 5-year portable-building anniversary my latest, greatest and probably BEST Atari 2600 portable should be done later this week! It contains all the features of the long-lost Vagabond 2000 project, which was the portable I intended to be the “sequel” to my original Atari portable. I kept running into snags and went into the Revisions 2-5 instead.

But now it’s crawled out from under the dust, gotten a completely new (yet old) case design and is almost done… Prepare yourself!