Merry Christmas everyone.

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Loafmeister:

--- Quote from: Loafmeister on January 02, 2018, 09:11:45 am ---
--- Quote from: RayB on December 31, 2017, 01:22:31 pm ---I thought I read the Tiny Arcades were exclusive to Cracker Barrel??

Anyways, I GOT ONE! yay!! Ms Pac Man. Very cool little collectable. It almost appears emulated but it could be coded from scratch (if so, they hired someone competent who actually gave a crap about delivering as close to the real game as possible, within the limits they had). The sounds are accurate (but low bitrate), mazes are accurate, but graphics reduced for a lower resolution and gameplay mostly authentic. Where they had to cut corners was not only frame-rate as mentioned above, but the ghosts and fruit positions are not updated every frame. Their AI also doesn't seem to be quite the same (they seem to wander around more and the red one doesn't seem faster or more likely to zero in on you, as far as I can tell so far...only got to maze 2). Cut scenes are there!

I do worry the joystick will break quickly, so in the end this won't be getting much play. Totally happy with it though and would love to get the others.

Also got an Atari t-shirt, PacMan tshirt, space invaders socks... The retro is strong this year!

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FYI to all, I can't even search these at crackerbarrel's website so I gather they lost the license to carry them? google shows a hit to a specific page but it's now coming up empty. As a Canadian who couldn't get these before, I now welcome this as 4 of these are now available on amazon.ca (through a US reseller but still, at least I can get them now!). Walmart.ca is coming up empty though, so perhaps amazon.ca is the only option for us at this time. Price isn't horrible at less than $30 CND including shipping so looks like I got no choice now ... ;).

--- End quote ---

Just closing the loop :)

Loafmeister:
FYI for those interested, here are my thoughts on the 4 tiny arcades I received yesterday.

Space Invaders: Seems to run at full frame rate, managed a decent score. I'm recovering from an operation I had today so in the next couple of days I'm going to play SI on the arcade cab to see how the Tiny Arcade version compares to the original. IMHO, I had a blast

PACMan, Ms Pacman and Galaxian. YEp, as mentioned earlier these tend to run at a fraction of the frame rate but they seem to play very authentically and are still fun.

Overall comments: seeing the nice cabinet art and the marquee that lights up is a super bonus. games that required 4 way joystick like pacman and ms pacman are certainly a bit harder to control. In saying that, it's a miracle the control just works, you just have to adapt and kind of move your finger in advance ready to change direction and you get used to it. Let's not kid ourselves, nobody is buying these to try and get to the kill screen of the PAC games eheh, but as a conversation starter and the odd game, it is superbly impressive, surpassed my expectations. It's also convinced me that once the raspberry pi gets to an eventual version where they can run , I probably will pick it up, just so cool!

I agree with whoever said earlier that those joysticks may not last so if you pass them onto guests to try, please advise them to be careful when flicking the joystick about.

Stuff I'd have loved to see in a perfect world: perfect frame rate, volume control and a better joystick.

Stuff along the same lines I'd love to see: mentioned above, maybe a 3 inch screen cabinet version that runs real mame with a decent joystick and maybe 2 or 3 button setup. Oh man...

Howard_Casto:
After seeing a bunch of these released over the past few months, each with varying degrees of accuracy and quality, I wonder if we could all put our heads together and assemble a kit for making scale miniatures. Maybe find an inexpensive, smallish display that interfaces easily with the pi and other micro computers and say "ok, this represents a 19 inch monitor" and work out the scaling and other parts from there. If we are lucky the scale would work well with a readily available thickness of plywood, but if not, a lot of us have 3d printers at this point and it would be easier to just print the cabinets anyway.

I have ideas on something like this, but I don't even know if anyone besides me would be nutty enough to want to do this. It might be hard to be in that ball-park 20 to 30 dollar range as well.

Titchgamer:
I dont think we could make them cheap enough tbh Howard.

By the time you have brought the pi, screen and controls your profit margin is shot.

Howard_Casto:
I didn't mean to sell, I just meant to make. There's no way a person could turn a profit unless the kits were sold for over 100 bucks or something crazy like that.

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