We are from Silicio, but we are going to present you the Oxytel Mini console, which is
tribute to an all-toulouse-end console made in 1976.
This is Ben and I am René.
I work about the historical part of the project, and Ben was on the electronic part.
He will talk you in a second half about how we implant some composants to make it work.
On our nice little console.
So, we are from an organization called Silicio, which is a certitude years old.
Our goal is to preserve the heritage of retro computing video games.
We also made a project like this one to commemorate some of the older actors of video
game, especially French one, because we are French organization, and we try to collect the
memory.
All through these years, we found an urge to create this model, because the memory about the
society that made the Oxytel was vanishing years after years.
So, this society is called the Society of Oxytel Electronic, it is a society founded by
Guy, whose name was Jean Louis, Grand Clément, I would say, J.L.
And it was in Toulouse in 1975 when he decided to create an electronic design piece in order
to make money, so he may say, but he created after he went to the US as he was working
for Motorola, who he found a new chip, a new chip from General Instrument that allows creators
to make a poor video game with very few components.
So, he thought he was a real opportunity in a market that he thought was going to be big.
Then, this was the console that he made, as you can see, it's ours is also the size
of the original, and we tried to make it work the same way.
So, this is the Occytel, first it was sold in form of kit, then it was more burritoed,
and the Society of Oxytel Electronic made several consoles from the original one to a computer
controlled video game in 1978, and numerous consoles on the same style, here's the match
with a nice tulip TV.
And in 1977 he created the first console with module, modules are like cartridges, but
you know, bigger form, where you had to put connectors on it, and it had several games,
several games allowed by different chips from General Instruments.
So, you had tank multiple players there.
Of course, it was difficult market because there were many, many content and the Occytel
had fewer arguments to offer, it was cheaper, cheaper to make, because it was the very
first in France to use the Pong chip from GI, and it worked well for Zenbot, an
cartoon tree, creating these video games, always different, but still they were all the same,
lead to an end in 1978, nobody wanted to play anymore Pong.
This way, Pong's the Society of Oxytel made for their brand, like Softlock Lanché,
which was a maker of batteries, so this particular console did
only work with batteries, you could not put a PSU in it, of course.
Well, in 1979, they created a cartridge console that I told you, it seems to be very
poor, but in in 79, it was nice, there were mostly in Europe, the video pack,
and the batteries, 200 VCS, and it did not add time to sell for a long time, and the
development of the games worked poor, see this one.
Finally, in 1980, they created a computer, which we have in our collection in Cilicium,
I think we have the only one, because they put a few of them, they were made for schools,
but unfortunately, in April, 80, it was the end, there was Bancroopsie, so Jean-Luc
here, and his wife, Clodani, had to stop the business, it was the end.
The Bancroopsie, in France, is something many society knows.
So, from this moment to the mid-90s, nobody ever heard about the Societe-Oxytel anymore,
because it was the video game, it was game, and nobody wanted to hear from it.
So, we started in 1984, so, in the beginning, we found this as we were in Toulouse,
we discovered the brand on a free market, or anywhere, people giving machines to us,
and years by years, we tried to recreate this tree of the brand as I told you,
and it was very difficult, because it was finding people that worked there, was uneasy.
Finally, we hired, I was able to find the creator Jean-Luc, which is still alive today,
but run beer factory, which is, I think, I think we don't like, and it do not care much more about
retro computing, but it's still done that you may have seen on the boxes I show you,
there were 10 or something, a very interested in our project, and they like it much.
So, that was the story, and we decided to create the console that Ben will talk to you about,
and just a few words before, we lost her after, no, lost her, it's better. So, yes, yes.
No.
I thought of you.
Yeah, I thought of you.
We are, I think we have all the pieces that they made in these days,
it was about what I didn't produce, that the SOI was a very successful company in the early years,
they were about 3,000 years in a console sold before each Christmas, it was the biggest one in France.
Okay, so now let's talk about the reproduction recreation of the original Oxytel,
in the form of, as you know, those popular devices that are like half-scale copies of the original
console, so we decided to do the same, except we go a bit more back in time,
76, 2025. So, you have seen at the very beginning the cover art of the box,
with the children of the creator playing on a TV set, so we went as far as recreating slightly grown-up
children, still playing the miniature machine, on, of course, a very retro orange monitor.
So, this is actually the cover art, we tried several pictures, we several, so you get that cover art,
if you get one of those, we created a really beautiful booklet about the history,
documents and so on, and we created, of course, the console itself, so I'll tell you a bit more
how these works, so half-scale reproduction, so this is the original one, including, sorry,
jacks for the external pedals, actually the linear sliders, they don't really work because they
were disconnected in favor of the external pedals, so we use the same technique, so that's what you
you can see here, description of the product on the website of our non-profit association,
and now a bit of technical data on this, so the original device runs with this,
the generone instrument AY3-8500, which is digital logic, it's not, it's not a mac compensator,
there's no software, it's not analog, it's digital logic, with hardware,
art counters, and comparators, and so on, and it generates, essentially the elements of composite
video signal, and then there is just a UHS module later, it's somewhere over there.
The original chip has three different options that have two values for the difficulty,
there is a three positions slider or in the original, so that's only three of the eight
possible difficulty settings, and it had four game modes, which are available, that's the main
slider in the middle, so that's what we created here, how we made it, we did not actually create
this design entirely ourselves, we reused a quite excellent emulation of the original generone
instrument chip on an Atmega 328, which is what you get on an Arduino Uno, itself it was based
on the TV out, bit-bonging video composite generation library, and audio also with time also,
I mean with video realian, more or less the same technique, there are actually two variations
of the generone instrument chip, 76 and 77, so that's also an option that's available to
jumpers on the motherboard, and so we how we did that by using something that's like an Arduino
Leonardo because it's easily found on very inexpensive modules, so that's the, as you could see over
there, microcontroller itself, the small parts are soldered on the daughter board, and so all we had
to do was the carrier board with connectors and buttons and sliders of the right
kind, so that they would be more or less half scale at the right positions for this reproduction
of the original package, half size, so yeah, our members, so yeah, I did some software adaptation
and the original hardware scheme ethics and so on, another member did the 3D case modeling and
then 3D printing, and there are a few changes in the software, in particular some bug fixes,
so that the software actually runs forever, whereas initially the original version of the code
would crash after an hour, go black, I mean the screen would go black, now it runs for weeks,
also consumes very little, it will run on battery for the whole day.
You can get everything hardware and bug, everything, and 3D case, creative come on,
and the software originally was MIT, so it's still MIT with our additional changes.
Everything you need, if you want to send the PCB to one of the well-known PCB
manufacturers that can do a short run for you, if you want to make one of yourself.
So I'll go quicker for that, so you can reprogram the module in case everything goes wrong,
but normally you would just use you, I mean through SPI, through a connector, but usually you would just use
USB if you want to reprogram change the game at some new games, there's some space left in the
flash, there's not a lot of RAM on this machine, so there are actually limits on what you can do.
How this were the interesting parts, maybe, the bit bugged video, so how that works, so video composite,
if you want to do black and white, you need only two signals, two GPIOs that are
all-on-o-thing, discrete outputs, and then a resistance and diode to get the right levels,
because what you want is, this is your ground level, 0.03 volts, that's for the synchronization
policies for lines and the whole page of the video composite monitor, and then from 0.03 volts to 1
volts, that's from black to white. So in this kind of capture, you actually can see a color, if you
know what to look for, you would see essentially a great scale bar here, so that's what the software
does pretty much with time else and with nops for timing the toggling of the GPIOs.
How you actually push some pixels, this is what this does, it gets one byte of the frame buffer,
then there will be one such block for each of the eight bits of one byte, tested in sequence,
and then toggling the right bit on the right port, so one byte that has a HEPA use,
there's just one GPIO that we want to toggle for luminance, and there's the same principle,
pretty much for the synchronization policies. And one thing to keep in mind, because this is running
from time else, as interrupts versus the game itself, which is the background task, if you have
something like a pointer, like a 16-bit counter or index in an array, that's not atomic,
because this is an 8-bit processor, so well, if you get that wrong, as in your original code,
at some point you will crash, because you will heat, of course, an interrupt right at the wrong time.
So now there's no bugs like that anymore. Another thing that it went wrong,
can you see what's wrong on the right, so this is the audio jack that goes into a female plug,
can you see what's wrong over there, that could cause the processor to reboot, it's over there,
as you can see, the two key on that, they are touching the same part of the plug, and one is
five volt, the other one is the slider of the potentiometer, that in one position is at the ground,
so that, of course, shops, circuits, the CPU, so that's another change to the original design,
just because we want it as plugin pedals, just have a currently meeting resistor,
so that's just by using the potentiometer scale, no more brownouts, because now that's just like
five volt and millimeter, two milliamps, and not short circuiting the power supply, the USB
power supply. So that's it for the various aspects of the project, how it came to life, various
fixes to be made, and why we had to run several iterations of the PCB, because we were not very
learning about that, so that was also a learning experience, and here you can see the the
resulting kit, the end product, a complete with booklet, the console itself, that you can see here,
so it has sound, it's just that this small monitor doesn't have sound, but it plays the
same beeps as the original console as well, a bit of bibliography, you can click on those links later
run, the slides are on the on the conference page, that's so I had to for you, credits, including
the models, very important models, as you can see over there, thank you very much,
do we have time for one question, if there are no questions,
where are all the games implemented in custom logic? The original games, they are they are actually
variations, you can see here that's actually accurate, sorry, yeah, repeating the question,
where all the games implemented in with the same logic, with the same hardware, and custom logic,
they are actually all pretty much sharing the same cups as you can see, if I switch the game,
the emulation is the same thing, you can see the ball is still at the same place, the
paddle at the same place is just changing the borders pretty much, oh the other general instrument
chips, yeah they were the same principle, because they were all digital hardware logic, not
the microprocessors with software, variations on the same AD, pretty much,
cost, yeah, sorry, so the question was, sorry, I end this in your point,
so the question was, why use the microprocessor, the microprocessor, that's so
so regionally hardware logic, cost just a few euros for the microprocessor board,
pales and gals on the FPGA, much more expensive, anything?