Oscilloscope turned into Star Wars-playing MAME machine

We've already seen an oscilloscope turned into a clock, but that hack has nothing on this latest one courtesy of Flickr user Moose2000, who took the old school piece of gear and rigged it to run (what else?) MAME. Even better, Moose chose to use the original Vector-iffic Star Wars arcade game to show it off, which no doubt suits the screen better than something like Street Fighter II. Sadly, there's no instructions for putting together your own rig (assuming you have a spare oscilloscope lying around, that is), but you can check out this one in action in the video after the break.

[Via Gadget Lab]

[Chris @ Dec 7th 2007 1:08PM]

I saw on the history channel the first "video game" was made on an Oscilloscope. It was like tennis, someone at a university made it in the 60's.

[Jagannath A @ Dec 7th 2007 1:11PM]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_video_game

[rzlmlchm009 @ Dec 7th 2007 1:10PM]

All this thing needs is a lever that you can apply when you plan to go into lightspeed. ;)

[nonamo @ Dec 7th 2007 1:12PM]

But can it play Doom!?!?!?!

[Andrew @ Dec 7th 2007 1:22PM]

This joke was old two years ago.

[rlynd3 @ Dec 7th 2007 1:39PM]

will it blend?

sorry, saw the cliché' above and had to do it...

[Andrew @ Dec 7th 2007 1:45PM]

I see what you did there. You took the joke of Engadget's bloggers and used it yourself. That's really clever, that's never been done before. Because, you know, Engadget uses that as their joke, so you see it a lot in posts. It's funny, usually, because it's their joke and they use it with some consistency. And now you've borrowed that joke and used it yourself! That's just...Just so clever, to think of that and to use a joke that is funny when other people use it and hope to make it your own, shooting for that illusive "Highest Rated" comment.

Wow. I don't know how you come up with it.

[nonamo @ Dec 7th 2007 1:57PM]

Well i thought it was pretty apt considering this can emulate MAME... and thats not far from being actually being able to play Doom. (unlike those idiots who use it to comment on a toaster or something)

[cmonkey @ Dec 7th 2007 3:15PM]

Andrew, The "but can it play doom?" meme has been around long before Engadget bloggers started using it.

[mogrinz @ Dec 7th 2007 1:48PM]

Scam. All he probably did was hook up a Zektor board (which already has a special version of MAME to play *any* color or black and white vector game). You can hook up a Zektor board to drive a b/w vector monitor, color, vectrex monitor, or a scope (as shown above). Nothing original here at all.

[james @ Dec 7th 2007 2:23PM]

It's not a scam, vector MAME has been around for years, it requires a hardware interface for the PC and is intended to drive a real vector monitor but there's no reason one couldn't use an oscilloscope. I regularly use my Tek 465 scope as a monitor when servicing Atari vector boardsets, techs have been doing that since these games came out.

[gt2378b @ Dec 7th 2007 2:53PM]

Why say it's "scam" when it sounds like you mean "he probably isn't a hardware wizard?" I didn't see any claims of originality made on either site.

[teej @ Dec 7th 2007 2:33PM]

yeah, but would NPH use it?

[Sixxtwo @ Dec 7th 2007 6:58PM]

Back when I was 11 and my dad was in the navy (HSL-37) in 1991 you could play tic-tac-toe on one of the cathode radar screens in an H-2 Seasprite!

It was cool for about 30 seconds, but tic-tac-toe isnt nearly as interesting as the cockpit of a helicopter when you are 11 =D

6

[dustin @ Dec 7th 2007 7:02PM]

Does this model have tetris built in?

[McDuck @ Dec 8th 2007 7:56PM]

MANY years ago (late 70's) I worked at a company that made scientific instruments based on a PDP-8 knock-off. Paper tape programming, 8K(!) memory, homemade operating system, O-scope vector display, etc. If it was any older it would have been steam powered. There was a test tech that wrote an AWESOME Star Trek shooter game for it!

McDuck