CAX 2025 - my "games of the show"

Didn't get to play any pinball during the show unfortunately. I do like seeing/playing some of the unique titles. Standouts for me were the Teeter Torture (I agree the controller really makes the game) and the Missile Command recharged. It's good to see the guys at Alan-1 really putting effort into making a new game while keeping enough of the original elements to make it "feel" like you're playing the original game.

I spent more time just reconnecting with friends as Joe was mentioning, the weekend was a bit of a blur for me.

Thanks for all the positive feedback on the QB-3, the main reason I built the CAB was for others to be able to play the game that never made it to production in as close to the form the original game designers envisioned. I spent many hours both researching and designing to try my best to meet that goal. I don't normally do build threads or posts but I may start a build/info thread on QB-3 since there does seem to be a fair amount of interest in the game.
 
If and when you have the time for that thread, please! QB-3 is pretty damn nifty and your build looks fantastic. Thanks for doing that in general, that game deserved it.
 
I finally managed to play a few games this year. Scramble, Black Widow and Kingpin...was either too busy or too tired. @joemagiera , didn't realize you were here. Would have loved to say hello. I still remember the arcade party in the Chicago area when I was there all those years ago.
 
I have a whole family of HP fans, and thank God noone wants the pin. I'd be screwed!

I'm not an HP fan, so no need here.
 
The only way I know of to run QB-3 is to have one of the toledoflyer's Cinevectron FPGA units in a Cinematronics cabinet or to build a cabinet around the FPGA unit as was done for this machine.

Maybe it's time for toledoflyer to make up some more of his most excellent Cinevectron units :cool:...hint... hint....

Jon
ummm, paging @toledoflyer ??? purty pleeeeeeeaasseee.... 🙏
 
ummm, paging @toledoflyer ??? purty pleeeeeeeaasseee.... 🙏
One of the big issues is the DE0-CV is no longer in production so I would need to migrate the design to a different FPGA board. Most of the reasonably priced ones don't have enough gates available for the entire design. I haven't even looked to see what other parts have gone obsolete since I designed it in 2018. Used ones seem to come up from time to time so I'm not sure there's enough demand to try and do a re-design and new production run of them.
 
One of the big issues is the DE0-CV is no longer in production so I would need to migrate the design to a different FPGA board. Most of the reasonably priced ones don't have enough gates available for the entire design. I haven't even looked to see what other parts have gone obsolete since I designed it in 2018. Used ones seem to come up from time to time so I'm not sure there's enough demand to try and do a re-design and new production run of them.
How many gates do you need? CLK frequency? On board peripherals? If there's enough interest I could possibly spin a board for you.
 
One of the big issues is the DE0-CV is no longer in production so I would need to migrate the design to a different FPGA board. Most of the reasonably priced ones don't have enough gates available for the entire design. I haven't even looked to see what other parts have gone obsolete since I designed it in 2018. Used ones seem to come up from time to time so I'm not sure there's enough demand to try and do a re-design and new production run of them.

Altera just separated from Intel and have a new board at the terasic site. Like cwilkson said, if you give us the specs we might be able to come up with a solution.
 
How many gates do you need? CLK frequency? On board peripherals? If there's enough interest I could possibly spin a board for you.
The Cyclone V on the DE0 is pretty full, I won't have access to my design files until Fri but from memory it's approx 40K LE's, lot's of multipliers and 1 PLL. No other on board periph's are used other than the on board USB Blaster ,the configuration prom, 50Mhz oscillator, 10 switches (for settings), 4 buttons (for menu navigation independent from control map), 7 segment displays (for troubleshooting but not required) and power supplies. Also, it uses pretty much ALL of the parallel I/O (72 pins I believe). A lot of the resources are used for re-creating the "analog" audio, probably >70%, mainly since I'm using DSP (mostly IIR filters) to generate the audio to mimic the frequency response/content of the original analog designs. That's for the FPGA board, if you were going to make a multi layer board for that (since the IO count kinda forces a BGA package) you might as well add all the interface circuitry and make a one board solution.
 
The Cyclone V on the DE0 is pretty full, I won't have access to my design files until Fri but from memory it's approx 40K LE's, lot's of multipliers and 1 PLL. No other on board periph's are used other than the on board USB Blaster ,the configuration prom, 50Mhz oscillator, 10 switches (for settings), 4 buttons (for menu navigation independent from control map), 7 segment displays (for troubleshooting but not required) and power supplies. Also, it uses pretty much ALL of the parallel I/O (72 pins I believe). A lot of the resources are used for re-creating the "analog" audio, probably >70%, mainly since I'm using DSP (mostly IIR filters) to generate the audio to mimic the frequency response/content of the original analog designs. That's for the FPGA board, if you were going to make a multi layer board for that (since the IO count kinda forces a BGA package) you might as well add all the interface circuitry and make a one board solution.

Yuck! I didn't think about BGA. And the USB. Probably over my head given my [IMMENSE LACK OF] free time.
So @mopar5150 you're up! (Me: Hides under a rock...)

@toledoflyer did you consider implementing the audio on a custom analog daughter card? If you're using 30,000 LE's to implement audio then doing it old school might open up more options on a prefab FPGA board. And we all know that the boards and chips go obsolete sooner than we'd like. So that might make a future port easier too. Would that be possible? Or did they use magic bullet parts that are no longer available?
 
@toledoflyer did you consider implementing the audio on a custom analog daughter card? If you're using 30,000 LE's to implement audio then doing it old school might open up more options on a prefab FPGA board. And we all know that the boards and chips go obsolete sooner than we'd like. So that might make a future port easier too. Would that be possible? Or did they use magic bullet parts that are no longer available?
Well.... Couple challenges (nothings impossible), keep in mind every Cinematronics game uses a DIFFERENT discrete sound board so you could make a "multi sound" board that was an amalgamation of 11 analog audio boards but that's a LOT of analog circuitry to squeeze on one board. Secondly, unfortunately, they did use a part that I haven't found a good direct replacement for and they used LOTS of them. That part is a "programmable" transconductance amplifier CA3080. Basically an amplifier whos gain can be controlled with a DC voltage. They used them for envelope control on almost every sound (using an RC to ramp the voltage up or down) as well as modulating other audio sources to create some pretty complex sounds. So although not impossible I'm not sure it would have been cost effective or even reasonable to go down that path.

If you were just wanting to make a single game OR if Cinematronics would have had some commonality in their sound boards this would be much more achievable.

I did consider just "sampling" the sounds and replaying them but many of the sounds don't have a discrete start and end, think the "whirring" background sound in Star Castle, and I really wanted to be very accurate with the sounds since they are so much a part of these games. I couldn't bring myself to take the "easy" way out like others have done with regards to sound on other "solutions". It does seem crazy that so much of the resources AND the development time was spend on that one aspect of the solution.
 
Yes! Ask an analog synth guy about the CA3080. That's a guaranteed sob story for you.

"How the hell do you build a proper VCA without a CA3080 to give the sound that feel??? HUH??? Nothing else compares to its noise profile!!!"

:ROFLMAO:

For purposes of arcade audio, you don't need that noise profile. You could use another OTA IC. I seem to recall a new modern clone exists and fairly cheap. But I dont remember the part number. And I think there are still dual and quad OTAs available. Or you could build something from transistors. I did that for Vector Pong. Just because. I needed a programmable current source with equal but opposite output values and "no magic bullet parts" was a design objective.
 
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