This is the fifth bav-o-rama in less than two years. This means I’m starting to move on this part of bava.studio after letting the first two linger for months (but The Shining and Creepshow windows were oh so good!). This Tetris/Console window was number five, and Mattia and I already have the sixth roughly mapped out. We might even make a They Live-themed event out of this one, maybe titled “The 1% are Aliens from Hell.” That would be a blast, just need to figure out some kind of shared event around expressing our concern at the grifting aliens leading this stupid world.
The Tetris diorama in all its glory. Like the Haunted Arcade event, the Tetris Tournament had a diorama to promote it, and this time we gave the window a “header” of sorts—with an image from the Tetris video game on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This small detail that Andrea and Riky came up with really makes the bav-o-rama feel like a blog post that much more, with a “featured” image at the top. So awesome. You can see the details in the following video run-through, but I’ll also map them out below.
The basic setup was having the NES version of Tetris playing on an old CRT. I have a couple of retro-gaming emulators at this point and a MiSTer on the way, so let’s go! For this one I took the Batocera gaming emulation machine that’s running on a Raspberry Pi4 and connected it to the TV with a little HDMI to composite convertor.
Nice thing about the Batocera is it’s easy to force a game to default load when it is turned on, so every time I restart the system it always opens NES Tetris. That was the most technical piece of getting NES Tetris on the TV (dead simple). The real coup was getting a wireless remote from AliExpress for 8 euro and a small bluetooth speaker that would allow people on the street to both play and hear Tetris.
The only bit I need to figure out is how to mount it cleanly so that the controller is secure and the speaker out of arms reach, but still hearable. I didn’t finish that piece in time. That said, I also never got the paneled walls that I mentioned in the in-process video above. But that got me thinking that this setup could be a recurring diorama that highlights a different console or technology on the CRT. I already have The Shining curtains and rug, which are absolutely perfect, and once I figure out a way to mount the controller and speaker, I can have the bav-o-rama double as a place for folks to play the old tech. Now it may only be emulated to start, I like the idea of figuring out how to get them on the OG consoles eventually—fun to experiment with this over time, especially with a MiSTer on the way—is FPGA emulation? Also this means hacking hardware like controllers which would be a blast.
If you look closely you might notice that the tapes next to the early 80s Panasonic VHS player (my childhood model) are four tapes that are actually an Easter Egg. If you have been playing along, those are all the dioramas to date. I’M ALL IN! The other bit is while I do turn off the TV and Batocera when I leave for the night, the blinking 12:00 on the VCR remains aglow. Is that not as true to life as one can get with 80s tech?
So not only was this diorama a bit different in that it moved away from scenes from 80s films, but it also is somewhat modular and experimental, and I really do love that idea. Laserdiscs were not really a thing here in Europe, so it might be fun to have one demonstrating that tech and highlighting the unmodified Star Wars New Hope disc 🙂 Fight the control freak sell outs!
I also picked up a PAL NES and a few tapes, but it is remarkable when you watch PAL vs. NTSC how much faster PAL can be for a game like Tetris. I have heard about it, but never was able to see it so clearly. I also go t the games Blades of Steel (my favorite) and Skate or Die! in addition to the OG Super Mario Bros. game, a true classic almost of Pac-man proportions … almost.
One of the reasons I’m using Batocera and not the actual console for the diorama is that the TV is NTSC and the console is PAL. We needed the other two PAL CRTs in the office for the competition, turns out two NTSC TVS would have even been better given the world champion prefers NTSC. Over the years I’ve learned a bit about switching between the two systems, which has been fun.
Anyway, major props to Mattia for helping me get the rug installed, which was probably the hardest piece of this one. This diorama was a bit more tinkering than actually building, which was fun. I went down a whole rabbit hole of hacking the NES Classic Mini with Hackchi2 CE and installing Retroarch and various gaming systems given I thought it might make more sense. In the end, however, the Batocera was much more versatile for the bluetooth for the speaker and controllers.
The day of the actual tournament I swapped out the NES with the Atari 5200 running the demonstration screen of Joust, a hint of the Console Windows to come 🙂 But this whole diorama was actually towards the great purpose of the Tetris Tournament with the great Giogi, so let’s get this blog party started …
