from the getting-all-your-fun-in-a-cardboard-box dept.
How to turn throwaway cardboard into a DIY arcade game:
Like many people across Colorado, Peter Gyory spent the height of the COVID-19 pandemic sitting at home with nothing to do. Then the researcher, a game designer by training, noticed all the random materials he had lying around his house.
"I was really frustrated that I couldn't make games," said Gyory, a doctoral student at CU Boulder's ATLAS Institute. "I realized I was surrounded by cardboard. I thought: 'How could I make a game out of that?'"
That was the birth of Tinycade. This project, the brainchild of Gyory and his colleagues at ATLAS, brings a do-it-yourself spirit to the world of video games. Tinycade allows anyone, anywhere to make a working arcade machine that can fit on a kitchen table or even a TV tray. All you need are a smartphone, some cardboard, two small mirrors and bric-a-brac like rubber bands and toothpicks. In other words: junk.
"The restriction I gave myself was that if you couldn't go to the grocery store and buy it, I couldn't use it in Tinycade," Gyory said.
He presented his team's invention last month at the Association for Computing Machinery's conference on Creativity & Cognition in Venice, Italy.
[...] Once the platform rolls out, gamers will only need to follow a few simple steps: First, you will download a set of stencils that will help you to cut out and assemble an arcade machine from spare cardboard. You then plop your phone in to serve as the screen.
The machine's controllers are also made out of cardboard and can be configured into a wide range of designs—from standard video game D-pads and joysticks to knobs, sliders, switches and much more. Within a Tinycade platform are a set of mirrors that allow your smartphone's camera to see what's going on under those controls. If you press right on the D-pad, say, the pieces will shift to reveal a digital "marker," which looks like simple QR code. Your phone will spot that marker, then tell the character on screen to move right.
[...] In the game Claw, which Gyory designed himself, players have to fight off a horde of oncoming alien ships. You slide around a cardboard claw, then pinch when you want to reach out and grab one of the enemy craft with a hook.
The team, however, has a more ambitious vision for Tinycade: Gyory and his colleagues hope that users will soon be able to use the platform to make new types of controllers for any game they can think of.
Brief video showing the concept.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2022, @02:18AM (1 child)
No smart phone, this is not for me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Some call me Tim on Monday July 25 2022, @03:16AM
That's okay. I'd rather have you paying attention to the road/sidewalk/whatever in public rather than an arcade game. It's a win/win for society.
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stretch611 on Monday July 25 2022, @02:49AM (2 children)
While not really DIY, I already have a Pi-cade. Essentially, an pre-made arcade cabinet with good quality joystick and buttons. Toss a Raspberry Pi in as the computer running retro-pie and its an excellent old school arcade machine.
There are plenty of different designs and part manufacturers out there for a wide range of prices and options. There is also a variety of emulators out there for the Pi (or other hardware) and retro arcade ROMs are easy to get with many actually legally available on the internet archive.
While this DIY project in all likelyhood is cheaper, I don't think it is likely to be as enjoyable as a pi-cade.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2022, @04:32AM
Maybe. But how would colorado.edu stay relevant otherwise?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday July 25 2022, @09:58AM
There is already an entire market segment for "mini arcades" (and mini 8-bit machines and various consoles etc). Not quite sure what this one brings except some cardboard feeling of junkiness. The Retro Mini Arcades are about $50, so the only way Cardboard Arcade would be cheaper I guess is if you somehow don't include the cost of the smartphone that is needed. Also the mini-arcade classics sort of actually do look like the classic arcade cabinets and they are not as flimsy as cardboard. That said I guess you have more options here since you could just change the game at the push of a few buttons etc.
https://www.basicfun.com/arcadeclassics/index.html [basicfun.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday July 25 2022, @04:56AM
The summary doesn't do TFA a favor in emphasizing the novelty in the concept or the intention of the author.
What I picked as interesting:
* today, there are ways in which one can prototype an effective gaming controller using very simple means (no plastics, 3D printers, electronic components)
* the idea one could create games that may actually require the "consumer" to build her own controller. I can only dream of a world in which the players's major fun is not game grind-time in a game (or pay to win), but in creating custom consoles that can make the game playable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday July 25 2022, @06:44AM (1 child)
in the bit where they classify a smartphone as "junk".
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday July 25 2022, @07:35AM
And that you can buy said junk at a grocery store, along with mirrors. What kind of grocery store do they have in their neighborhood, that sells cell phones and mirrors? In my grocery store I can't even buy rubber bands. They do give them for free at the deli section, but if I want to buy them, I have to go to a stationery store.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday July 25 2022, @10:56AM (5 children)
Haha, that was much more flimsy than I thought. Given the sheer amount of cardboard that piles up when you live off delivered supplies for a year of lockdown, I imagined that it was a full scale arcade cabinet, made by laminating together several patchwork layers of packaging cardboard. Maybe 4 or 5 layers, in the spirit of cardboard furniture, with some clever honeycomb arrangement to work around the rigidity loss from the makeshift approach. I skipped over the "machine's controllers are also made out of cardboard" in the summary, so I was quite amused to see how it really looked like.
Good idea if there's boredom during the next lockdown. Or go all-out and build a pinball machine from proper delivered wood (and then the arcade cabinet from the packaging the wood came in).
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday July 25 2022, @01:04PM (4 children)
I don't think this was made with endurance in mind. These cardboard cabinets wouldn't hold up to the wear and tear of a full size arcade cabinet. The classic once was already made out of very cheap wood, usually some of the cheapest plywood glue products. They looked sturdier then one would imagine. Backside is plywood appears to be really good at sucking up moisture and water so they will start to rot. A lot of them also had to install kickplates/panels at the foot level cause people tended to break them. So unless you are looking for a utterly solid cardboard+glue combo I don't think it would stand up. Also if you go fullsize the screen would probably make the whole structure collapse if you went old-school CRT.
(Score: 1) by aafcac on Monday July 25 2022, @03:38PM
That doesn't surprise me. During the height of arcades, it probably wasn't much of a concern how the cabinet would hold up in a years time, as there was a constant churn of new games to have. I've been considering building my own cabinet with VESA mounting hardware for an LCD and make the entire thing easily disassembleable. With a USB controller board for the buttons, and modern interfaces for the screen, it should be pretty straightforward to assemble and disassemble such a cabinet.
The main reason I don't own an arcade cabinet is simply space. Those 3/4 sized cabinets aren't that expensive, and even without modding them, they can play a fair number of games.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Monday July 25 2022, @03:51PM (2 children)
I raise you a Vitra "Wiggle" cardboard chair: https://www.vitra.com/de-ch/living/product/details/wiggle-side-chair [vitra.com] (Not that I'd ever get one, one spill of water and a grand is done for, and I'd rather waste my money on a (mostly plastic!) Embody anyway, if I had too way much spare change...)
But I think a reasonably sturdy home use arcade cabinet can be done in cardboard. Yes, it would be the "utterly solid cardboard+glue combo", laminated hex tiles between two sturdy outer panels of double-layer cardboard. But if you're bored and that stuff piles up, no one stops you from going down that path of recycling all the cardboard. One would just have to account for the engineering properties (e.g. it will be very sturdy for some directions of load, but not in others). 20mm thick cross-hex-lamination could easily statically load down the weight of a real CRT, you'd just have to have specific mount point reinforcements for those critical points (joystick and button mountings, too). So better go for a TFT from the garbage pile with MAME's fuzziness emulator.
Then have your laser print a poster on a matrix of 200g A4 paper (or that Tyvek-like stuff) to use for the cabinet artwork, and finish the edges with some t-strip wrapped in insulation tape.
The whole thing would not be resistant to water and aggressive poking attacks, but that's not much of an issue unless you get fits when you lose. Maybe add that kick plate for such occasions.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday July 25 2022, @04:04PM
That chair had a very interesting look, but I don't think I would plonk down a $1k for one. Question then I guess is how much of that is for the design and how much is for material. If you built an arcade cabinet like that it would probably hold up. But then it would be quite think, so you might need a few extra vent holes. Question is cost, after all you can get some very cheap wood or woodlike products and composites where they mix wood and plastic and god knows that are dirt cheap and would probably hold up fine. The main thing about the arcade cabinet would be a solid inner structure and then the sides can more or less just be cardboard thin. The banner graphics are usually printed on some plastic materials like large durable stickers. A lot of the weight at least previously was to have some structure so it didn't fold since people tend not to be to gentle and to hold the CRT in place. If you can replace that with a new modern thin display you will have dropped probably 90% of the weight. The 2-3 boards to hold the game and sound doesn't weight that much and the power supply usually rests at the bottom or is bolted to the side near the bottom. Some reinforcement in the front near the feet is nice since people tend to kick, even if not in anger.
Then some lamps to backlite the marquee, a few speakers etc. T-stripes to fill in all the gaps between boards.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2022, @08:28PM
Fun Frank Gehry link. For those that don't know the name, he's responsible for a bunch of CAD designed buildings that are full of oblique and curved surfaces. CAD easily lets him create free-form 3D designs and check the structure with FEA, something other architects have been a little slow to pick up. Some are cute but nearly all of his buildings leak and have other problems because contractors/construction crews mostly only know about right angles (with the exception of peaked roofs).
I take your expensive "artsy" Gehry furniture, and raise you one very practical Victor Papanek and his Nomadic Furniture books.