Circuitbeard created this adorable and pixel-perfect miniature OutRun cabinet to sit atop their bar, complete with not-a-Ferrari dashboard and original cabinet decal art. Check out Picade for a primer on how the guts work (and to buy similar guts).
Outrun, the classic racer that blew players' minds with its huge colorful sprites, is getting an ususual port: to the monochrome vectorbeam world of the vintage Vectrex console.
Creator Chris Parsons:
A little "demo" I put together today to warm up my coding skills as I get back to developing my second full Vectrex game. I put the Pole Position overlay on at the end as it comes out clearer without it when filming. Check out my Vectrex home brew games on here and at www.vectorrepublic.co.uk
He's gotten the Ferrari, the tarmac and some roadside palms going, but it's missing other vehicles and curves: "Now, should I try to add some game in there???" Read the rest
Running a retroarcade sounds like a lot of fun, and the same games that used to get the kids pumping quarters then are still the most popular. Which means that 32-year old OutRun cabinets tend to break down often.
Out Run is a favorite at the arcade to say the least. It is in almost constant use from our younger Players. One of the reasons of course is that Sega designed this particular model to basically make you feel you were in an actual vehicle. While not quite like the Ferrari Testarossa Spider you drive in the game itself, it’s a nice design. Furthermore there were four different versions of the arcade game produced. Two of them were upright models with two others being sit-down cabinets.
Great fun working around hot CRTs! You can whine about authentic monitors all ya like, if I were running an arcade, I would replace the innards on most of the machines with Raspberry Pis and 4k LCDs and put the original PCBs in a nice glass cases on the wall next to each, with art gallery-style cards. Read the rest
Behold the most amazing arcade hack in existence: Matt Brailsford, AKA Circuitbeard, crammed Sega's OutRun into a Tomy Turnin' Turbo dashboard. [via]
Some key features are an integrated 3.5” TFT screen, fully usable steering wheel and gear shifter (dashboard turbo light comes on when in high gear), working ignition key for power, true MPH speed and rev counter displays, and a fuel gauge to represent the stage time remaining.
The project itself was quite a big one for me, filled with several moments of frustration, from burnt out potentiometers, to soldering LEDs backwards, multiple TFT screen purchases and more than one change in direction as approaches to problems were found to be inadequate.
All the toy's hardware is hooked up to the game, running on a Raspberry Pi with a PiCade board and Kookye 3.5" display. He worked around the lack of pedals by using the gearshift to accelerate and brake. How he made a physical LED dashboard to show the in-game speed completely escapes me. Genius!
Here's the original mechanical toy, for reference:
OutRun was a great game, a true classic that came to define the mid-80s renaissance of arcade culture. As its buzz died down, though, my friends and I, arcade rats all, traded (and invented) rumors about the forthcoming sequel. One of the beautiful lies one of my pals came up with was OutRun Nights, which he swore to God he had seen in a conveniently-distant arcade in Torbay where he'd just been on holiday.
Unfortunately, none of the real sequels were remotely a good as the original, let alone as fused to the collective consciousness of children raised by the NTSC avatars of David Hasselhoff and Jan-Michel Vincent. To this day, however, I sincerely believe in the parallel Segaverse and thought it worthy of sharing, with just a few tips of the hat to modernity. Specs follow: Read the rest
