WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:11.560 We are from Silicio, but we are going to present you the Oxytel Mini console, which is 00:11.560 --> 00:19.480 tribute to an all-toulouse-end console made in 1976. 00:19.480 --> 00:22.560 This is Ben and I am René. 00:23.440 --> 00:30.800 I work about the historical part of the project, and Ben was on the electronic part. 00:30.800 --> 00:37.960 He will talk you in a second half about how we implant some composants to make it work. 00:37.960 --> 00:42.200 On our nice little console. 00:42.200 --> 00:49.920 So, we are from an organization called Silicio, which is a certitude years old. 00:50.000 --> 00:57.440 Our goal is to preserve the heritage of retro computing video games. 00:57.440 --> 01:06.560 We also made a project like this one to commemorate some of the older actors of video 01:06.560 --> 01:13.720 game, especially French one, because we are French organization, and we try to collect the 01:13.720 --> 01:14.720 memory. 01:14.720 --> 01:27.120 All through these years, we found an urge to create this model, because the memory about the 01:27.120 --> 01:35.480 society that made the Oxytel was vanishing years after years. 01:35.480 --> 01:43.160 So, this society is called the Society of Oxytel Electronic, it is a society founded by 01:43.240 --> 01:50.160 Guy, whose name was Jean Louis, Grand Clément, I would say, J.L. 01:50.160 --> 02:01.840 And it was in Toulouse in 1975 when he decided to create an electronic design piece in order 02:01.840 --> 02:12.760 to make money, so he may say, but he created after he went to the US as he was working 02:12.840 --> 02:21.680 for Motorola, who he found a new chip, a new chip from General Instrument that allows creators 02:21.680 --> 02:26.840 to make a poor video game with very few components. 02:26.840 --> 02:35.720 So, he thought he was a real opportunity in a market that he thought was going to be big. 02:35.720 --> 02:45.680 Then, this was the console that he made, as you can see, it's ours is also the size 02:45.680 --> 02:51.800 of the original, and we tried to make it work the same way. 02:51.800 --> 03:00.800 So, this is the Occytel, first it was sold in form of kit, then it was more burritoed, 03:00.880 --> 03:10.040 and the Society of Oxytel Electronic made several consoles from the original one to a computer 03:10.040 --> 03:20.880 controlled video game in 1978, and numerous consoles on the same style, here's the match 03:20.880 --> 03:24.880 with a nice tulip TV. 03:24.880 --> 03:32.960 And in 1977 he created the first console with module, modules are like cartridges, but 03:32.960 --> 03:39.360 you know, bigger form, where you had to put connectors on it, and it had several games, 03:39.360 --> 03:44.840 several games allowed by different chips from General Instruments. 03:44.840 --> 03:51.240 So, you had tank multiple players there. 03:51.280 --> 04:01.080 Of course, it was difficult market because there were many, many content and the Occytel 04:01.080 --> 04:08.080 had fewer arguments to offer, it was cheaper, cheaper to make, because it was the very 04:08.080 --> 04:18.520 first in France to use the Pong chip from GI, and it worked well for Zenbot, an 04:18.600 --> 04:27.240 cartoon tree, creating these video games, always different, but still they were all the same, 04:27.240 --> 04:34.240 lead to an end in 1978, nobody wanted to play anymore Pong. 04:34.240 --> 04:41.040 This way, Pong's the Society of Oxytel made for their brand, like Softlock Lanché, 04:41.040 --> 04:48.480 which was a maker of batteries, so this particular console did 04:48.480 --> 04:55.480 only work with batteries, you could not put a PSU in it, of course. 04:55.480 --> 05:05.080 Well, in 1979, they created a cartridge console that I told you, it seems to be very 05:05.080 --> 05:13.040 poor, but in in 79, it was nice, there were mostly in Europe, the video pack, 05:13.040 --> 05:28.640 and the batteries, 200 VCS, and it did not add time to sell for a long time, and the 05:28.640 --> 05:34.920 development of the games worked poor, see this one. 05:35.000 --> 05:44.800 Finally, in 1980, they created a computer, which we have in our collection in Cilicium, 05:44.800 --> 05:50.680 I think we have the only one, because they put a few of them, they were made for schools, 05:50.680 --> 06:02.960 but unfortunately, in April, 80, it was the end, there was Bancroopsie, so Jean-Luc 06:03.040 --> 06:12.320 here, and his wife, Clodani, had to stop the business, it was the end. 06:12.320 --> 06:20.040 The Bancroopsie, in France, is something many society knows. 06:20.040 --> 06:31.040 So, from this moment to the mid-90s, nobody ever heard about the Societe-Oxytel anymore, 06:31.120 --> 06:38.160 because it was the video game, it was game, and nobody wanted to hear from it. 06:38.160 --> 06:47.920 So, we started in 1984, so, in the beginning, we found this as we were in Toulouse, 06:47.920 --> 06:55.360 we discovered the brand on a free market, or anywhere, people giving machines to us, 06:55.440 --> 07:02.480 and years by years, we tried to recreate this tree of the brand as I told you, 07:02.480 --> 07:13.040 and it was very difficult, because it was finding people that worked there, was uneasy. 07:13.040 --> 07:23.040 Finally, we hired, I was able to find the creator Jean-Luc, which is still alive today, 07:23.120 --> 07:32.000 but run beer factory, which is, I think, I think we don't like, and it do not care much more about 07:33.040 --> 07:38.560 retro computing, but it's still done that you may have seen on the boxes I show you, 07:39.360 --> 07:45.040 there were 10 or something, a very interested in our project, and they like it much. 07:45.760 --> 07:54.400 So, that was the story, and we decided to create the console that Ben will talk to you about, 07:55.040 --> 08:05.520 and just a few words before, we lost her after, no, lost her, it's better. So, yes, yes. 08:08.560 --> 08:08.880 No. 08:09.360 --> 08:13.600 I thought of you. 08:19.200 --> 08:20.480 Yeah, I thought of you. 08:22.640 --> 08:27.760 We are, I think we have all the pieces that they made in these days, 08:28.480 --> 08:36.240 it was about what I didn't produce, that the SOI was a very successful company in the early years, 08:36.240 --> 08:45.440 they were about 3,000 years in a console sold before each Christmas, it was the biggest one in France. 08:46.160 --> 08:52.400 Okay, so now let's talk about the reproduction recreation of the original Oxytel, 08:53.680 --> 09:00.240 in the form of, as you know, those popular devices that are like half-scale copies of the original 09:00.240 --> 09:04.480 console, so we decided to do the same, except we go a bit more back in time, 09:05.680 --> 09:12.880 76, 2025. So, you have seen at the very beginning the cover art of the box, 09:12.880 --> 09:20.480 with the children of the creator playing on a TV set, so we went as far as recreating slightly grown-up 09:20.480 --> 09:26.400 children, still playing the miniature machine, on, of course, a very retro orange monitor. 09:27.040 --> 09:32.320 So, this is actually the cover art, we tried several pictures, we several, so you get that cover art, 09:32.320 --> 09:41.920 if you get one of those, we created a really beautiful booklet about the history, 09:41.920 --> 09:47.280 documents and so on, and we created, of course, the console itself, so I'll tell you a bit more 09:47.840 --> 09:55.040 how these works, so half-scale reproduction, so this is the original one, including, sorry, 09:55.120 --> 09:59.680 jacks for the external pedals, actually the linear sliders, they don't really work because they 09:59.680 --> 10:05.600 were disconnected in favor of the external pedals, so we use the same technique, so that's what you 10:05.600 --> 10:13.120 you can see here, description of the product on the website of our non-profit association, 10:13.840 --> 10:19.760 and now a bit of technical data on this, so the original device runs with this, 10:20.080 --> 10:29.600 the generone instrument AY3-8500, which is digital logic, it's not, it's not a mac compensator, 10:29.600 --> 10:33.360 there's no software, it's not analog, it's digital logic, with hardware, 10:33.360 --> 10:38.720 art counters, and comparators, and so on, and it generates, essentially the elements of composite 10:38.720 --> 10:43.280 video signal, and then there is just a UHS module later, it's somewhere over there. 10:43.360 --> 10:50.880 The original chip has three different options that have two values for the difficulty, 10:50.880 --> 10:55.120 there is a three positions slider or in the original, so that's only three of the eight 10:55.120 --> 11:00.560 possible difficulty settings, and it had four game modes, which are available, that's the main 11:00.560 --> 11:07.920 slider in the middle, so that's what we created here, how we made it, we did not actually create 11:08.080 --> 11:15.280 this design entirely ourselves, we reused a quite excellent emulation of the original generone 11:15.280 --> 11:23.440 instrument chip on an Atmega 328, which is what you get on an Arduino Uno, itself it was based 11:23.440 --> 11:30.720 on the TV out, bit-bonging video composite generation library, and audio also with time also, 11:30.720 --> 11:35.760 I mean with video realian, more or less the same technique, there are actually two variations 11:35.840 --> 11:41.440 of the generone instrument chip, 76 and 77, so that's also an option that's available to 11:41.440 --> 11:48.880 jumpers on the motherboard, and so we how we did that by using something that's like an Arduino 11:48.880 --> 11:55.520 Leonardo because it's easily found on very inexpensive modules, so that's the, as you could see over 11:55.520 --> 12:00.480 there, microcontroller itself, the small parts are soldered on the daughter board, and so all we had 12:00.480 --> 12:05.680 to do was the carrier board with connectors and buttons and sliders of the right 12:05.680 --> 12:11.200 kind, so that they would be more or less half scale at the right positions for this reproduction 12:11.200 --> 12:19.600 of the original package, half size, so yeah, our members, so yeah, I did some software adaptation 12:19.600 --> 12:26.640 and the original hardware scheme ethics and so on, another member did the 3D case modeling and 12:26.640 --> 12:33.520 then 3D printing, and there are a few changes in the software, in particular some bug fixes, 12:33.600 --> 12:38.320 so that the software actually runs forever, whereas initially the original version of the code 12:38.320 --> 12:43.440 would crash after an hour, go black, I mean the screen would go black, now it runs for weeks, 12:44.160 --> 12:47.040 also consumes very little, it will run on battery for the whole day. 12:48.800 --> 12:55.200 You can get everything hardware and bug, everything, and 3D case, creative come on, 12:55.200 --> 12:58.960 and the software originally was MIT, so it's still MIT with our additional changes. 12:59.920 --> 13:07.040 Everything you need, if you want to send the PCB to one of the well-known PCB 13:07.040 --> 13:10.400 manufacturers that can do a short run for you, if you want to make one of yourself. 13:12.400 --> 13:18.800 So I'll go quicker for that, so you can reprogram the module in case everything goes wrong, 13:18.800 --> 13:23.520 but normally you would just use you, I mean through SPI, through a connector, but usually you would just use 13:23.520 --> 13:28.960 USB if you want to reprogram change the game at some new games, there's some space left in the 13:28.960 --> 13:33.440 flash, there's not a lot of RAM on this machine, so there are actually limits on what you can do. 13:33.440 --> 13:39.360 How this were the interesting parts, maybe, the bit bugged video, so how that works, so video composite, 13:40.240 --> 13:44.400 if you want to do black and white, you need only two signals, two GPIOs that are 13:44.400 --> 13:49.680 all-on-o-thing, discrete outputs, and then a resistance and diode to get the right levels, 13:49.760 --> 13:56.320 because what you want is, this is your ground level, 0.03 volts, that's for the synchronization 13:56.320 --> 14:02.960 policies for lines and the whole page of the video composite monitor, and then from 0.03 volts to 1 14:02.960 --> 14:10.240 volts, that's from black to white. So in this kind of capture, you actually can see a color, if you 14:10.240 --> 14:17.040 know what to look for, you would see essentially a great scale bar here, so that's what the software 14:17.040 --> 14:24.080 does pretty much with time else and with nops for timing the toggling of the GPIOs. 14:25.200 --> 14:30.800 How you actually push some pixels, this is what this does, it gets one byte of the frame buffer, 14:31.440 --> 14:38.240 then there will be one such block for each of the eight bits of one byte, tested in sequence, 14:38.240 --> 14:44.960 and then toggling the right bit on the right port, so one byte that has a HEPA use, 14:45.040 --> 14:50.240 there's just one GPIO that we want to toggle for luminance, and there's the same principle, 14:50.240 --> 14:54.480 pretty much for the synchronization policies. And one thing to keep in mind, because this is running 14:54.480 --> 15:00.160 from time else, as interrupts versus the game itself, which is the background task, if you have 15:00.160 --> 15:05.840 something like a pointer, like a 16-bit counter or index in an array, that's not atomic, 15:05.840 --> 15:11.360 because this is an 8-bit processor, so well, if you get that wrong, as in your original code, 15:11.440 --> 15:16.160 at some point you will crash, because you will heat, of course, an interrupt right at the wrong time. 15:17.200 --> 15:23.600 So now there's no bugs like that anymore. Another thing that it went wrong, 15:24.800 --> 15:32.400 can you see what's wrong on the right, so this is the audio jack that goes into a female plug, 15:32.400 --> 15:38.880 can you see what's wrong over there, that could cause the processor to reboot, it's over there, 15:38.960 --> 15:42.720 as you can see, the two key on that, they are touching the same part of the plug, and one is 15:42.720 --> 15:48.320 five volt, the other one is the slider of the potentiometer, that in one position is at the ground, 15:48.320 --> 15:55.600 so that, of course, shops, circuits, the CPU, so that's another change to the original design, 15:55.600 --> 16:01.840 just because we want it as plugin pedals, just have a currently meeting resistor, 16:01.840 --> 16:06.640 so that's just by using the potentiometer scale, no more brownouts, because now that's just like 16:06.720 --> 16:11.360 five volt and millimeter, two milliamps, and not short circuiting the power supply, the USB 16:11.360 --> 16:16.160 power supply. So that's it for the various aspects of the project, how it came to life, various 16:16.160 --> 16:22.320 fixes to be made, and why we had to run several iterations of the PCB, because we were not very 16:22.320 --> 16:27.600 learning about that, so that was also a learning experience, and here you can see the the 16:27.600 --> 16:34.080 resulting kit, the end product, a complete with booklet, the console itself, that you can see here, 16:34.960 --> 16:39.520 so it has sound, it's just that this small monitor doesn't have sound, but it plays the 16:39.520 --> 16:45.600 same beeps as the original console as well, a bit of bibliography, you can click on those links later 16:45.600 --> 16:53.840 run, the slides are on the on the conference page, that's so I had to for you, credits, including 16:53.840 --> 17:04.400 the models, very important models, as you can see over there, thank you very much, 17:06.240 --> 17:14.800 do we have time for one question, if there are no questions, 17:14.800 --> 17:24.160 where are all the games implemented in custom logic? The original games, they are they are actually 17:24.160 --> 17:29.040 variations, you can see here that's actually accurate, sorry, yeah, repeating the question, 17:29.040 --> 17:34.640 where all the games implemented in with the same logic, with the same hardware, and custom logic, 17:34.640 --> 17:39.520 they are actually all pretty much sharing the same cups as you can see, if I switch the game, 17:39.520 --> 17:42.880 the emulation is the same thing, you can see the ball is still at the same place, the 17:42.960 --> 17:50.320 paddle at the same place is just changing the borders pretty much, oh the other general instrument 17:50.320 --> 17:55.280 chips, yeah they were the same principle, because they were all digital hardware logic, not 17:55.360 --> 17:58.720 the microprocessors with software, variations on the same AD, pretty much, 18:07.200 --> 18:15.600 cost, yeah, sorry, so the question was, sorry, I end this in your point, 18:15.600 --> 18:20.800 so the question was, why use the microprocessor, the microprocessor, that's so 18:20.800 --> 18:25.680 so regionally hardware logic, cost just a few euros for the microprocessor board, 18:26.320 --> 18:31.360 pales and gals on the FPGA, much more expensive, anything?