bavaweekly 12-29-2021 -the Video Version!

Posted on December 29, 2021 by Reverend

Well this was a blast, the following video is a culmination of some streaming experimentation I’ve been doing since Christmas Eve. Winter break has become a time to return to some fun stuff I neglected throughout the year, and learning to use the ATEM Mini was time well spent!

In fact, it was because of this play time that I was able to get this stream together, and I have to say it came out better than expected. I messed up only once with forgetting to loop in the audio from VLC, so the three personal videos I played were without sound, but they were short and I was talking over them anyway. There were  a ton of moving parts, and I literally spent hours preparing, but for a first try at doing a focused stream with a clear beginning, middle and end, this felt pretty damn good.

I did write up this week’s bavaweekly notes, and I will get a post out in a day or two chronicling my thoughts, but at this point I’m shot. Not so sure I can spend anymore time in front of the computer, but there’s now a 20 minute video with a weekly recap of everything from Reclaim Hosting’s Holiday film party to news on the Arcade front to a look at my streaming setup, as well as some personal highlights from this week that include hanging with Duke and spending time with the fab fam. Special thanks to Anne-Marie and Chahira for watching and commenting in the livestream chat. I have to say I am loving Owncast, and having folks cheer you on is even more amazing. You both rule!

Xmas Lunch 2021

I forgot to include a lunch from Christmas lunch in the stream, so I’ll include it below, and then try and get a proper blog of this week’s reflects out of my notebook and into the ether. But here is a spoiler: it was a good week!

Posted in bavaweekly | Tagged | 3 Comments

bavaweekly: 12-21-2021

Posted on December 21, 2021 by Reverend

Christmas in Trento

At this point, three weeks in, I’m finding these weekly reflection posts essential. It’s literally 30 minutes of reflecting and capturing the weeks work, another 30 uploading and organizing images, and then writing the post, which has been sketched out beforehand with pen and pad.  It’s awesome, I highly recommend it, thanks again for the inspiration D’Arcy!

Happy Duke!

Reclaim Hosting

  • This week we had an All Hands Meeting adroitly led by Lauren Hanks, and it was really cool to see everyone together and how much Reclaim has grown. We are focusing on community outreach and professional development for Reclaim Cloud in 2022, amongst other things, and having everyone together already spawned new ideas like inter-division working groups as a way at professional development with very focused projects.

Reclaim Hosting All Hands Meeting December 2021

  • As evidenced from the slide above the 2022 Reclaim Round-Up (our name, thanks to Pilot, for the monthly newsletter) is a topic of conversation. We are thinking it might be fun to use the open source blogging-cum-newsletter app Ghost for this as yet another way to highlight open source apps in Reclaim Cloud. Absolutely thrilled Pilot has been running with this project out of the gate, and we just spun up a fresh version of Ghost on Reclaim Cloud that has all their recent features, so we are thrilled.

  • Taylor has got his first community chat schedule for January 12th, 2022, Reclaim’s first official event in the New Year. He’ll be focusing on building a showcase site for Domain of One’s Own schools to highlight work from their community, you can read more about it  here, and/or sign-up using this link: https://forms.gle/dkHo8ZzwvQJNHXnC6. In fact, Taylor, Pilot, and I just got off a call with UT Austin that highlighted that our emerging instructional technology group has an almost instant niche for our newest partners when it comes to highlighting possibilities and digger deeper on framing their work for their specific context. I am fired up!
  • Much of the previous week has been closing out Reclaim’s books, which means talking to the accountant and wrapping my head around numbers and projecting for the year to come. I have mentioned it before, but I do enjoy this stuff in part for its complexity, which was compounded this year with additional moving parts from Reclaim Arcade which has been fully operational since January 2021, but more on that next week.

bavacade

Stargate Exploding with Colors

  • I held off on installing the multi-game Gyruss mod until next Sunday given I want to avoid suffering disappointment in the days leading up to Christmas. I feel projects gone wrong deep in my stomach, it is literally painful.
  • Still need to get in touch with local tech to figure out the Asterock issue and Astro Invader power issue on marquee, so still a work in progress

Streaming

  • The ALT Winter Conference KaraOERoke session was a blast. I wrote about it on the bava already, and was inspired by the session to get a third monitor for our next event, which I believe will be January 21, 2022. You better book Chahira and I fast given we are in hot demand 🙂

  • Thinking of Karaoke, I’m still planning to do something more regular in the New Year for anyone interested, and one idea I had was ALT Karaoke, meaning singing songs no one really know, like Unwound’s “Dragnalus” or Ty Segall’s “My Lady’s on Fire” —just a thought…

Reading/Watching/Listening

  • Saw Don’t Look Up! in the theaters, we are too close to everything happening in it to laugh just yet.
  • My oldest was reading Kafka’s The Trial in Italian for school, so I returned to it as well given his enthusiasm reminded my how much I loved Kafka in my 20s. Returning was bitter sweet given he is still so awesome, but the soul crushing sense of the world hits even harder as you age. Like a dog….
  • Into season 5 of Better Call Saul, ready for it to end, but I have to see it through.
  • Watched both Four Christmases and Die Hard with the family, candy never tasted so good!
  • Listened to a lot of ds106radio while blogging this week thanks to Nigel broadcasting from the South Pacific. His sets were personal and on point as always, he is a perennial DJ for sure.
  • Missed the Sunday Special given I was out for dinner with family, but will need to hit the archives and listen to both that show and the aftermath with Jon Fulton and Brian Lamb. ds106radio is the gift that keeps on giving.
  • Read an interesting article in the New York Times about the anti-vaccination mentality in Alto Adige, that is the German-speaking Italian region just north of Trentino, and their proximity to Austria and general distrust of Italy’s government offers and interesting scenario. The article mentions an earlier historical anti-inoculation protest in the 19th century with concerns amongst Catholics that the shots were injecting Protestantism in their veins:

In the beginning of the 19th century, after conquering the area [Alto Adige], Napoleon annexed it and attached it to Bavaria, which in 1807 mandated smallpox vaccinations for its subjects. In 1809, the people of the region rose up in armed revolt in part against vaccination, which they thought injected Protestantism into their Catholic veins. To spread the alarm, they lit bonfires throughout the area.

  • I bought the French noir novel Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos thanks to Paul Bond’s recommendation from last week’s reflection, so thanks Paul! Will be arriving tomorrow, and will be reading that and the Ray Harryhausen book over break.
  • It was Tommy’s birthday last week, and it was fun to celebrate that champion!

Personal

    • It was Tommy’s birthday last week, and it was fun to celebrate that champion!

Tommaso Birthday Boy!

  • This past week flew by. pretty much heads down work alternating with Christmas shopping and dealing with a leaky pipe in the wall—which was not fun.

  • Wasn’t able to hike/walk as much but did have fun with family during a Sunday night dinner at a favorite Pizzeria, Salesá.
  • Going to try and see the new Spider-man in English tonight, that said there has been a noticeable uptick of COVID-19 cases here in Trento and yesterday introduced a new series of restrictions and we are now “Giallo” on the color scale of COVID concern. Looks like we are on the verge of locking-down again soon, not a fan.
  • On the bright side there is the possibility we’ll have a white Christmas in Trento (or at least the surrounding mountains will have a fresh coat).
  • At this point it’s Christmas or bust, and I’m loving that! One more of these weekly updates before 2022, and the last one this year will be mostly reflective and speculative given I hope to accomplish very little between now and next week. Happy holidays!
Posted in bavaweekly | Tagged | 2 Comments

bavacade: New Chassis for Stargate and Phoenix

Posted on December 20, 2021 by Reverend

I seem to be procrastinating the Gyruss multi-game high score save kit project given all the soldering required, but that is proving productive in other ways. For example, yesterday I decided to swap out monitor chassis* for both Stargate and Phoenix. There was a cold solder joint in Stargate that resulted in the red color not working after the game warms up. This was annoying me, and when I was in the US back in November I picked up a few extra chassis, in particular the Wells Gardner K4900 series given 4 of my games have some variation of that chassis. The K4900 has several versions distinguished by the number of adjustment controls (known as pots) they have: so there are 3-pot, 4-pot, and 5-pot models. I have a 3-pot and a 4-pot K4900 chassis for 19″ monitors (which all my games in Italy have currently), and the 3-pot was what I needed for Stargate.

Stargate Exploding with Colors

I was a bit nervous with this one given I dropped the chassis in the parking lot of Reclaim Arcade when brining it to my car, but apart from a corner chipping, the chassis worked beautifully, and Stargate is no longer losing the red color after warming up. YEAH! Overall this was easy, but the one thing about the K4900 3-pot chassis is the vertical positioning is controlled by a jumper cable that gives you 3 different options, I had to move this to the left-most connector to position the screen perfectly.

Image care of Arcade Buffett shared on KLOV forums demonstrating the jumpers for vertical position on a Wells Gardner K4900 chassis

After that I spent about 30 minutes chasing my tail finding the volume control on Stargate cabinet given it was pretty loud. After some research I realized it was right in front of me the whole time.

For Williams games like Joust, Defender, Robotron, and Stargate they have a separate sound card that has a separate volume pot that is actually not on the board, but connected via a wire to be more convenient for coin door access. It’s not like other volume control pots on other games that are usually on the game board.

Phoenix looking good with new K4900 Chassis

The other chassis swap was for Phoenix, which is using a 4-pot K4900. I knew this chassis was solid because I watched the Arcade Buffett service and test it and I did not drop it in the parking lot 🙂 The swap out was pretty easy and the adjustments were minimal It was good to have this one swapped out because the right side of the screen was compressing given the chassis needed a cap kit, and it would only start to correct after warming up for 30 minutes.

This also means I have 3 cap kits to do: these two monitors and the G07 I replaced on Astro Invaders earlier this fall, so once I have the home arcade dialed-in—which is getting really close now—I can turn towards practicing my soldering on cap kits and building up some reserve chassis.

__________________________

*A monitor chassis is the unit that interfaces between the game board and the CRT tube. It essentially converts the code to interactive light via some kind of amazing 3-color beam alchemy.

Posted in bavarcade, video games | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Reclaim KaraOERoke at ALT’s Winter Conference

Posted on December 18, 2021 by Reverend

Just sitting here on a sunny Saturday morning listening to Sinéad O’Connor on #ds106radio broadcasting live from New Zealand, things could be a lot worse. Speaking of the radio, this week Chahira Nouira and I hosted the second Karaoke session in as many weeks that was broadcast to edtech’s only freeform radio station!

This session was part of ALT’s Winter Online Conference, and KaraOERoke is synonymous with ALT given this tradition has been so closely tied to the OER Conference (run by ALT) as far back as 2017 in London. In fact, a couple of Reclaimers plan on returning to London this Spring for OER 2022 to try our hand at some hybrid KaraOERoke, so I guess you’ll just have to submit a proposal to find out more 🙂

Anyway, I do think the setup for this edition of KaraOERoke was the tightest yet. The approach was similar to the setup for the OERcamp Global conference in that we used Owncast for folks to watch the stream and chat—and the chat was en fuego for this one which was super fun. I also registered the domain reclaimkaraoke.com so that I can create subdomains for the various karaoke sessions. I named this one altcwinter21.reclaimkaraoke.com -but the nice part is these Owncast instances can be spun up and spun down as needed so no need to keep them beyond the event. In fact, the subdomain URL for the event can just link to the archived video after the fact, which means it might make sense to setup a Reclaim Karaoke Peertube* instance at reclaimkaroke.com, nothing like having a good idea while writing:)

Below is an archive of the session, which Maren Deepwell was the thus far unmentioned co-host and participant. Maren is amazing, and getting the opportunity to connect with her is reason enough for KaraOERoke. In fact, the ALT team pretty much made up the audience, and I for one am super grateful to the great folks like Emma-Jane and Emma McAllister for not only cheering us all on, but joining the singing fray. They made it awesome.

Couple of things Chahira and I chatted about at the end of the session after the dust settled. Overall it is getting better …

  • We demonstrated how to share your audio when screen sharing in Zoom, which would have helped for OERcamp. to avoid technical issues.
  • We did not have any real audio ducking this time around, and part of that is because we used our Zoom room. I think we if use other folks’s Zoom rooms we have to adjust audio settings accordingly.
  • The production value is still wonky when switching between hosts and singers. I should have brought Maren in through obs.ninja like Chahira, and all hosts need green screens so we can really tie the room together.
  • I am working currently on getting a third monitor because I do think isolating Zoom windows of singers and being able to capture the chat would be a nice touch, but right now I don’t have enough screen real estate to do the share screen, manage OBS, and deal with the many windows of Zoom.
  • In terms of screen real estate, Streamdeck helped a lot on this front given I could switch shots, bring up banners, and start/stop recordings and streaming with the click of a dedicated button. That said, we still need to monitor what is streaming out, so not perfect yet.
  • One good thing is that Loopback is in a place that all audio is being recorded seamlessly, so that is a huge win. When I share my screen folks both in Zoom and on the stream can hear me as well as any Youtube video sounds, so audio has been pretty dialed-in. And that means the radio stream is equally tight. I just need to work on making the shows establishing shot and karaoke transitions more seamless. There is much more to be done on the video side of the house.
  • It is also might be high time to talk with Bryan Mathers about some Reclaim Karaoke art, I mean it is time to turn it up to 11 🙂

I do want to do more regular Karaoke sessions for fun in 2022. Need to think of a good day and time once or twice a month for a karaoke crew to get together in order to make this stuff a bit more streamlined and regular. Practice makes perfect. I also still have plans for streaming some Italian cop films from the 1970s on bava.tv, but that is a separate project. In fact, one of the things we discussed with Maren after doing an impromptu analysis of the song “Last Christmas” by Wham in this Karaoke session was the possibility of a movie watching event in the spirit of Mystery Science Theater 3000 as part of the virtual event for OER22. Not sure if this makes sense, but once again something I would love to play around with.

_______________________________

*Here’s to hoping Peertube gets a live chat feature for streaming videos soon, cause that means that could be the one-stop-shop for Reclaim karaoke, but I do like the simple visuals of Owncast’s layout.

Posted in karaoke | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

bavaweekly 12-14-2021

Posted on December 14, 2021 by Reverend

I decided to move these weekly updates to Tuesday so I’m not feeling compelled to write on Sunday, so that’s my first tweak of this weekly experiment. Also, kinda fitting to move to Tuesdays given the site is titled bavatuesdays. I’m finding the quick 20-30 minute jotting of notes before writing a weekly review quite useful, and the subsequent organization of pictures from the week is a much needed element of structure to my daily documentation. I hope I can make this habit stick. Anyway, let’s begin…

8-Bit Bava in the Snow

Reclaim Hosting:

  • Finding my mornings taken up with a lot of end-of-the-year accounting. One of the things I learned about myself since starting Reclaim Hosting is how much I enjoy the accounting and projection piece of running this business. I became obsessed with it early on because watching the money made sure we were not going broke, but it has evolved into a healthier process of investing in people and growing the business slowly and surely.
  • There has been a lot of interest amongst existing Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) schools in Reclaim Cloud. Part of this was fueled by our retiring Cloud Linux on our shared and institutional servers, but also the questions various admins bring to us around what can and cannot be run on DoOO has led to new conversations about what’s possible beyond cPanel, and we can finally say maybe, or even yes, do those questions, which is awesome. Yesterday Pilot, Taylor, and I met with Skidmore to get them playing with Reclaim Cloud as a sandbox, and on Thursday we’ll be meeting with the folks from NYU Libraries, so that has been pretty fun, and hopefully a sign of things to come.
  • Speaking of Pilot and Taylor, I really do feel like the emerging Instructional Technology “group” is starting to take shape at Reclaim. It is nascent for sure, but last week we had a great meeting with Taylor about his experience as an admin at St. Norbert College, which led to an inspiring discussion around baking in a community site to Domain of One’s Own, more targeted outreach around what admins need in terms of Domains analytics, and more. I feel like we are finally moving the discussion of our products to a more proactive, exploratory approach–which is refreshing and energizing after over 8 years of just trying to keep up. We’re including Pilot in more of the instructional technology discussions going forward, hence the suggestion a “group” is forming. I am hoping over the next 6-12 months we start experimenting and sharing some of what’s possible in both the cPanel LAMP stack and on the Cloud and documenting recipes, possibilities, and reaching out to the broader Reclaim community to find out what needs they have and how we can help. Exciting stuff!

bavacade:

Modified Phoenix Home Screen with High Scores

  • I started mapping out the Gyruss multi-game high score save kit project on Friday, with the idea I would be working on it over the weekend. I started on Saturday by reassembling a Gyruss bootleg game board I bought earlier this year as a backup for the original game board I will be working on, etc.  That bootleg has two auxiliary boards that are pinned in, but not soldered, so they can and did come out during delivery. Making matters worse, it was the larger of the two which is more complicated to align given there are seven different sets of pins across the board that need to be almost perfectly lined-up and then pushed back in. Long story short, it proved a total nightmare. And even after thinking they were back in, the game board did not work. Still going to try working on the original Gyruss board this weekend, but now without a back-up board, so the pressure is on. I’m probably going to have to ship the bootleg out and get it tested and have a professional reset and solder the auxiliary board.

Gyruss and Duca

  • In more frustrating arcade news …. I have two Italian-made Sidam arcade machines from the early 80s, Explorer and Asterock, bootlegs of Scramble and Asteroids respectively. I bought them over the summer, and the Explorer has not worked right from the get go, there were vertical hold issues on the monitor out the gate, but I thought it was an easy fix. Back in nAugust, while trying to fix it, the the power supply unit started acting up. Soon after that the power supply unit (PSU) on my other Sidam game,  Asterock, went bad. So, in an attempt to cut losses, I had them both serviced this fall and they came back yesterday. The power supply unit worked on Explorer, so that game was back up, but the Hanterex 9000A monitor chassis was still not holding vertically, so I am getting that worked on.  I hope to have Explorer up and running. once I get the chassis serviced. After plugging in the PSU for Asterock that game was back up, and it’s so beautiful. But after about 15 minutes it started getting wonky, and soon was just a blank screen with solid lights for players 1 and 2 with the sound board making a loud humming noise (and the occasional thrust sound effect). From what I have been reading this is a voltage issue on the sound board, so it may still be a power issue, but this time at the sound board level—it’s always a power issue with these games. So, there may be yet another thing to fix on this Asterock as well, but first we need to do some testing. That said, this was a bit of a bummer and consumed me most of yesterday cause I really wanted to play a gorgeous black and white vector Asteroids knock-off.

Sidam's Asterock and Explorer Opened Side-by-Side

  • Finally, I got a new marquee light for Astro Invaders, but that game was converted from 110 Volts (US) to 220 Volts (European) so there are some weird things happening with the power. While testing voltages I tripped the circuit breaker on the first floor, so I am getting some advice on this before pushing through.
  • But despite the perceived setback of Asterock, once I have the chassis for Explorer fixed all but one game of eleven will be fully operational, and of those 7 will have high score save and free play capabilities, and four of those feature multiple-games (Millipede, Donkey Kong Jr, Cheyenne, and Gyruss—assuming that last one works). So the arcade is looking quite solid, and my goal is to have every single game working and minted out before the Spring shipment comes with another 10-15 games. Overall I’ve made quite good progress on the fledgling home arcade this year, but next year will have even more projects given some of the incoming cabinets need some TLC, so I have to get out in front of what’s here now and finish strong.

Streaming:

  • Chahira and I did the Friday Night Karaoke session for the OERCamp Global conference and that was a blast, as always. Chahira is a great co-conspirator, and it helps that we both love singing karaoke. I learned a few things from this iteration: 1) it takes a good 20-30 minutes for folks to warm up to it, but they do want to sing; 2) an hour is too short cause folks are just getting going; 3) I could do a better job demoing how to share audio for a video in Zoom—and make a point of testing audio before folks get in the groove. I’ll try and bring these lessons learned to tomorrow evening’s Karaoke session for ALT’s Winter Conference. Things will go wrong, as they always do, but I get a rush from when folks sing and have fun.

Reading/Watching/Listening:

  • Still lacking here, had Sonny and the Sunsets album Antenna to the Afterworld on constant play
  • Better Call Saul continues to consume my evening watching, and I just started season 4, so getting there
  • No reading beyond the web, so I am getting stupider by the week, but I did receive this ridiculously awesome gift from Anne-Marie Scott, it’s good to know people in high places like Edinburgh — Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema will be my holiday read for sure.

Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema

Personal

  • Battling the Christmas mania is never fun, but trying to keep spending and my corrupted spirit in check. The fact it snowed earlier this week helped with that holiday feeling as well.

Snow in Park

  • Hiking/walking more always helps me this time of year. I’ve been much better about getting out with Duke every day and we did a beautiful 8 mile hike to the Bindesi in the snow on Sunday. It was precious time with my special lady friend.

View from Bindesi Rifugio

One Love

Bello Duca

  • After the hike the whole family made headway on the decorating, which was fun. We fought, we laughed, we ate some good pizza. A near perfect day.
  • Also, looks like we might be taking a 3 or 4 day snowboarding/skiing trip in early January, which has me excited. Been too long off the slopes with all this COVID insanity, and I am ready to get back to the wilds of Trentino given all the snow we already have.
Posted in bavaweekly | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Phoenix High Score Save Kit and then some…Redemption!

Posted on December 9, 2021 by Reverend

NEC D8085AC Replacement CPU

A replacement CPU for the one I cracked on the Phoenix game board arrived on Monday. I was thrilled to take another “crack” at getting the high score save kit  working on Phoenix so I could have both free play and high scores saved on one of my all-time favorite games. The chip fit into the daughter board socket perfectly, which I then plugged into the PCB seemingly without issue.

Daughter Board for Phoenix HSS with new chip

Seemingly…when I plugged the board back in and tried it I was getting garbage from the board like the following:

It was the same error I was getting when I tried the board with the broken chip previously, which made me think it was linked to an issue with the soldering of the socket (see this post for all the gory details). I was pretty depressed given I assumed a pad around one of the pins was burned out and it was causing this issue. But when I removed the daughter board and inspected the pins I realized I had broken a leg on the daughter board of the high score save kit when plugging it in:

Broken Pin on Phoenix HSS Daughter Card

I broke one of the legs (lower left in the image above) on the daughter board, which was a new twist to an ongoing nightmare project. As a test I removed the CPU from the daughter board and plugged it directly into the game board and plugged it back into the machine and the game worked! Whew, that was a relief, it meant my soldering was not the problem, and seems like the garbage on the screen was a result of the broken pin on the daughter board. But how do I fix that?

DMLL Expo Pin

I was stumped, but I saw a video were someone used wire to replace broken chip legs, but I needed something a bit more solid than wire. So I found an old pin from the Coventry DMLL Expo and cut a piece off and soldered it directly to the board.

Mined Pin for Replacement Pin :)

This meant removing the remaining broken piece and then opening up the black plastic a bit so the pin could be soldered in cleanly and still use the remaining part of the black plastic for stability:

Hacked Replacement Pin for Phoenix HSS Kit

Replacement Pin for Phoenix HSS

Admittedly this was a pretty ugly hack, but it was all I could think to do with the tools at hand. But the best part was that it worked!

Phoenix HSS Menu

After replacing the game board and turning it on (while pressing left and fire simultaneously) I got the long hoped for menu screen, which was no small victory for this arcade hack-hobbyist … REDEMPTION!!!

High Score!

I could now save high scores, and even add my initials/name for all to see.

Modified Phoenix Home Screen with High Scores

The high score kit actually modifies the main screen to include the top 5 high scores. So, now my Phoenix game has free play and saved high scores. I can also backup and restore those scores at any time, not to mention the ability to turn off the 204K point bug, but why would I do that?

Phoenix

This was without question the most satisfying arcade project yet because it was quite challenging and I had to find a non-standard fix to an issue of my own making. I’m still very much a novice/hack, but this gave me the confidence I needed to take on the Gyruss multi-game kit which will require quite a bit of soldering and modding to get working.

Posted in bavarcade | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

bavaweekly: 12-6-2021

Posted on December 6, 2021 by Reverend

Well, as mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be trying to capture various things that happened from week-to-week in these, hopefully, quick weekly summaries. The reason is it takes me some time to right a blog post, and hopefully these weekly posts will help be condense the happenings so they are documented because if everything requires its own, potentially-lengthy post nothing will captured. Anyway, it’s a work-in-progress, so we’ll see what happens.

Reclaim Hosting

  • Big new son this front, after seven years at St. Norbert College Taylor Jadin has joined Reclaim as a Community Instructional Technologist. The fact that we have hired an instructional technologist is pretty magical on many fronts, and hopefully I can parse some of the reasons in a future post, and Taylor has been an amazing member of the Domains community for years, so having him onboard is an honor and a pleasure—looking forward to working closely with him for the foreseeable future!
  • Last week also so the official announcement that we will be retiring Rockaway Hosting and moving all existing account back into the Reclaim Hosting fold. This was a long time coming, and 2021 has been about growing, consolidating, and focusing on what’s next.
  • The end of last week also featured a meeting wherein talks around a Domains API were re-started, and a project for 2022 initiated. This is something we’ve been talking about on and off for years, so here’s to hoping 2022 marks a big leap forward in this possibility.
  • Chris Blankenship and Lauren Hanks definitely earned their Reclaim wings last week dealing with a server issue that required extensive recovery work and communication simultaneously (never easy), but the fact that Tim and I were not on the frontline marks a big turning point.

bavacade

Exidy 440 Dev Kit Game Menu

  • Installed dev kit on Atari Millipede that not only adds free play and high score save capabilities, but also several other games like Centipede, Super Breakout, and Warlords. You can read the post about it here with all the gory details: “Multipede: 4-in-1 Cabinet Fun!”
  • Installed dev kit on Cheyenne that adds nine more Exidy shooting gallery games, including Crossbow, Combat, Chiller, Clay Pigeon, Catch-22, Crackshot, Hit ‘n Miss, Combat, WhoDunit, and Showdown. I posted about this as well just this morning, so you can read more here: “Exidy 440 Dev Kit on Cheyenne.”
  • A failed project was trying to get the marquee light for Astro Invaders working. Looks like there is a short in that circuit somewhere, so that project is on the docket for this week, as well as installing the multi-game kit for Gyruss, which fills me with dread given the need for desoldering CPU chips 😐

Streaming

  • I spent a bunch of time last week re-visiting my streaming setup and playing with Peertube and Owncast as possible options for the OERcamp Global’s Friday Night Karaoke session I’ll be co-hosting with Chahira Nouira. Not gonna lie, I totally love the karaoke stuff, and not only because I have an awesome voice, but also because I love to play with streaming stuff. I wrote two posts on the setup, one focusing on my test with Peertube and another on Owncast. For the OERCamp Global session on Friday night October 10th at 9 PM CET we’ll be using an instance of Owncast mapped on karaoke.oercamp.global.  This is doubly cool because it will allow me to introduce the session with a quick nod to what’s possible on Reclaim Cloud—always be branding!
  • I also cross-cast all the video streaming experiments to ds106radio, so there’s that.

Reading/Watching/Listening

Creepshow Soundtrack by Waxworks

  • Tom Woodward presenting “It Could be Beautiful-Aspirational Learning Technology”– is well-worth your time. Tom talk about what pursuing the mind-blowing experiences when integrating tech into teaching and learning, and I can dig it!
  • Miles and I are on a Better Call Saul kick while re-watching Breaking Bad —it’s wholesome fun:)
  • I got my Criterion streaming fix with The Swimmer —it’s all about aging not so gracefully. What an awesome film.
  • George Romero’s The Crazies – I picked up the VHS tape and an original movie poster when I was back in the States, so I had to watch this pandemic classic again. Gas masks were a theme this week given the role they play in Breaking Bad and the the fact we will soon be required to mask outdoors in Trento …. ugggh!
  • Creepshow soundtrack from Waxworks —the cover art says it all, and it’s fun music to work to for sure

Personal

Parco Gocciadoro

  • Mostly day walks with Duke and Anto to parco Gocciadoro as it starts to get colder here, looks like our first ski/snowboard outing will be next weekend.

Say Cheese!

  • Pretty quiet week all round. Feeling the work groove while preparing for Christmas with some initial shopping and house prep.
  • Starting uploading a few thousand photos to Flickr in hopes of vetting and publishing photos I took in 2021 before year’s end.
  • Duke and Daphne got hair cuts and look so good!

A#1

  • Postponing Christmas trip to NYC -my dad’s not getting any younger and my kids miss all the aunts, uncles, cousins, so this year was gonna be the one we made it home. But not gonna happen for a few reasons, so punting until Easter. A bit sad, but relieved not to be traveling at Christmas for sure.
Posted in bavaweekly | Tagged | Leave a comment

Exidy 440 Dev Kit on Cheyenne

Posted on December 6, 2021 by Reverend

Cheyenne 440 Dev Kit

On Saturday I spent much of the afternoon installing the Exidy 440 Dev Kit that adds another 9 games to an existing game board, so basically all the Exidy shooting gallery games can be played on my Cheyenne cabinet, such as Crossbow, Combat, Chiller, Clay Pigeon, Catch-22, Crackshot, Hit ‘n Miss, Combat, WhoDunit, and Showdown.
That is pretty awesome, and as. with the Millipede multi-game installation, this one went pretty smoothly, although quite time consuming given the total number of chips I needed to remove was over 50!

EPROMS to be Removed from main Game Board

I documented the process fairly heavily and uploaded the photos to Flickr as an album because I want to remember everything I did should I ever need to revert the board back to a stand alone Cheyenne. This is the second of four multi-game mod kits I’ve installed, the other two are for Gyruss (happening later this week) and Pac-man, which will have to wait until next year given that game is still in Virginia—in fact there are quite a few that need to make the jump over the pond 🙂

I will spare you a play-by-play here of this project given HighScoreSaves has documented it well in their Exidy 440 Dev Kit Installation Guide. That said, the project reinforced a few things:

  • The value of taking a lot of pictures of edge connectors and chip placement given I was continually come back to what chip was placed how when adding the daughter cards.
  • How awesome socketed chips are because the do not require any soldering—learned this lesson the hard way with desoldering the Phoenix CPU.
  • Patience is always a virtue when removing chips, and I spent well over an hour listening to music and slowly and methodically removing dozens of them
  • Preserve anything removed given originals are always valuable—a saved all the EPROM chips I removed and organized them accordingly so I can replace them if need be

Main Board EPROMS all Removed

I also think the game board in Cheyenne is a Crossbow board, at least the date 1983 suggests as much, and I imagine Crossbow was the earliest of this group and then the various variations were just modifications. But I have heard that swapping boards between these Exidy games can create serious issues with the power supply, which concerned me after buying a Crossbow back-up board for this game. But now I know it is a Crossbow board I think I might be in good stead.

Cheyenne/Crossbow Main Game Board

Above is the orginal board before removing EPROMS and chips and adding daughter boards, and here is the Crossbow label on the sound board:

Crossbow Soundboard Labelled

That 1983 copyright makes me think it is a Crossbow board with Cheyenne chips given Cheyenne was not released until 1984. The main board also has a date of 1983, but I’ll have to do a bit more digging to confirm this.

Cheyenne/Crossbow Main PCB Complete

Above is a look at the main game board will all EPROMs removed and the daughter card inserted in the 6809 CPU as well as the PROMs K7 and H9.

Bird's Eye View of Sound Board on top of Game Board and 440 Dev Kit Installed

And the picture above has a visual of both the main board as well as the sound boord installed above it with the two daughter boards over the EPROMs and the 6809 CPU with a ribbon cable connecting the two.

View of both Game Board and Sound Board Mods Installed

I did run into one issue on the first attempt at installing the board, the ROMs read cleanly but never booted beyond a check. Turns out I did not turn off the dip switches on the main board, but after doing that it loaded cleanly to the boot-up menu and allowed me to change cabinet, high score save kit, and game settings. You can pretty much do everything from that menu, include adjusting sound, deciding which game you want to be the default at boot-up, custom sound settings (stereo versus mono), turn on/off attract sounds, save all high scores, and much more. I really love the culture around modding these old 1980s video games to both keep the original experience while at the same time providing you a bit more convenience along with a few more games to play. It is a perfect balance between the absolute purism of all original serial numbers and the undignified generic LCD cabinet with MAME games galore.

Exidy 440 Dev Kit Game Menu

Exidy 440 Dev Kit Game Menu

And I now get to play my favorite of the Exidy shooting gallery games: Crossbow!

Crossbow on Cheyenne (Exidy 440 Dev Kit)

Projects like this that keep on giving after they’re finished really do make this hobby quite rewarding!

Cheyenne Cabinet Playing Crossbow

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

bava weekly

Posted on December 5, 2021 by Reverend

Just as D’Arcy Norman pauses his weekly reflections I’m contemplating starting mine. While browsing D’Arcy’s site a while ago I really dug his quick, snapshot summries of what he was up to the previous week. He’s been doing these weekly reflections for awhile, and it should come as no surprise he should lead the charge and burn out before I even become fully aware of the power of what he’s done—that’s often the case with D’Arcy. He quietly and consistently does great work in edtech, and it sounds like he’ll soon have a Ph.D. to augment his already formative super powers … avanti!

I have a few things happening across various contexts any given week, and I appreciate the way D’Arcy categorizes his reflections: work, Ph.D., reading, personal, etc. I’m thinking of categorizing things along the following lines:

Reclaim Hosting: much of my time is still spent working and thinking about Reclaim Hosting, and a weekly synopsis would definitely be useful for me to reflect on for posterity. Plus, catching all the ideas we chat about any given week would be a way to start collecting material for the Reclaim Hosting newsletter we are architecting for 2022.

bavacade: Reclaim Arcade is increasingly Tim’s domain, and what an awesome one it is!  Given my geographic isolation from that arcade nirvana, I’ve started acquiring games for the Italian outpost. Collecting and working on arcade cabinets has become a total blast for me, and the process of building out a home arcade here in Italy keeps me busy and happy.

Reading/Watching/Listening: I probably watch more movies/series than I read these days—a casualty of not teaching 🙁 That said, I’ve returned to reading more literature the last few months, and this might be a good way to take stock of my media consumption with lists, short reflections, etc.* Also, I’m listening to a fair amount of music during any given work day, and incorporating that into more streaming (see below) is a goal for 2022.

Broadcasting (Radio/Video Streaming): As part of all the above interests I have streamed a fair bit over the last two years on ds106radio, karaoke video ds106.tv sessions, bava.tv, Reclaim Today, Reclaim Arcade stuff, etc. It was my favorite lockdown activity that has since become another fun past time to play around with. At the same time I rarely blog that stuff and it can quickly get buried in the black hole that is my hard drive, so this is a good way to take stock, even if it’s just lists and links: the primordial ooze of any great blog 🙂

Personal: Duke updates? I have heard on good authority that my dog needs more airtime across all my mediaz. Not only will it help me document some of the hikes, trips, highlights, etc., but also have a reason to upload and vet the photos I have taken any given week given l haven’t really found a place/workflow beyond Twitter to share them—having abandoned Instagram earlier this year.  That said, I have started uploading several thousand photos I took this year to Flickr again, so we’ll see if I can get back into that habit. I love to document all the stuff I do here in Italy, but I find time is moving a bit faster than my fingers these days, so an attempt to try and capture a bit of this without a separate post for everything may help in that regard. But then again, mapping it out here in a blog post filled with hope and possibility is a bit easier than actually doing it on the regular for 52 weeks, but it would be great if I did because archives of thought and reflection like that have been the greatest joy of playing the long web on this blog for the last 16 years.

Ok, so now that I built it up, I’m gonna try it on for the remaining weeks of December. I intend to post them Monday mornings as a way to jump start the week, but if you never hear mention of the “bava weekly” again, you know what happened 🙂

______________________________

*I would like to link to blog posts, sites, projects, etc. I mean folks like Stephen Downes, Audrey Watters and Chris Lott have been doing awesome newsletters for a long while (OL Daily, Hack Education, and/or Katexic anyone?), but I’m afraid these weekly reflections will be far more self-indulgent and idiosyncratic than anything resembling a newsletter—it’s a “b” blog after all. It’s not lost on me how much work goes into a well curated newsletter, and between family, job, arcade games, hikes, and dogs I just don’t have that kinda time. Truth be told, it’s really just a weekly blog post, so even comparing it to anything resembling a newsletter is already wishful thinking and false advertising.

Posted in bavaweekly | Tagged | 4 Comments

Friday Night Karaoke at OERcamp.global

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Reverend

So, it’s officially scheduled, next Friday, December 10th, Chahira and I will be running Friday Night Karaoke at 8 PM UTC for the OERcamp.global Unconference. You can find the following description on the unconference programme site as well:

Join Chahira Nouira and Jim Groom for a Friday Night Karaoke session as a welcome respite from all the serious open educational technology. I mean you can only take so much textbook liberation, amirite? Use this time as a welcome respite to sing your favorite Eagles song for all the open web to hear.

More seriously, just show up, prepare to laugh and have some fun via chat in the soon to be announced Karaoke room (http://karaoke.oercamp.global), and, ideally, muster up the courage to join in the fun and sing your favorite tune.

It is worth noting that the open source streaming software driving this session, Owncast, will be run through Reclaim Cloud which is this session’s subtle nod to the power of open infrastructure to re-imagine how we work and play online.

In fact, most of this presentation is arguably in the setup leading up to the singing. This is not our first karaoke rodeo, we’ve done this before on Zoom and streamed to ds106.tv. But this time is a bit different in that we have spun up a dedicated app, Owncast, on Reclaim Cloud to stream the session to in order to enable viewing and chatting outside of Zoom. For all intents and purposes Zoom will only be for folks who want to sing whereras the karaoke stream and chat will be a social event for folks to have fun around the proceedings. What’s more. we’re working with the good folks at OERcamp.global to point the subdomain karaoke.oercamp.global to this environment on the cloud so that there is a sense of branding/cohesion to the experience as a way to demonstrate the power of quickly spinning up and down a an open source streaming app with a built-in chat tool. The medium is the massage, and I can’t think of a more compelling way to highlight the power of Reclaim Cloud than to lead with a concrete demonstration of what’s possible while at the same time keeping it loose and fun. So, it turns out this session is kinda about open infrastructure and Reclaim Cloud after all, we’re just delivering it slant.

Playing around a bit more I was able to add a basic info slide to the streaming site

Posted in karaoke | Tagged , | 2 Comments