Clavius and Friends

This shot is several weeks old but it never posted for some reason.

It is definitely one of my best yet.

Custom Princess Luna Vectrex Controller Overlay

Vectrex joysticks are apparently notorious for losing their self centering ability when one of the springs breaks. This is what happened to mine. It can be repaired by transplanting a spring donated by one of those Atari 2600 cartridges you just can't get rid of, but to open the control panel up you have to access five screws hidden underneath the hard plastic label. These things and even the modified Sega Genesis controllers are hard to come by these days but since I had a spare and I knew I would end up destroying the label if I attempted to remove it I was content to just leave it as is. However, when playing games that use analog control and a few games that don't, it tends to pull to the left even though the stick itself is in the center.

After my confidence was boosted by successfully cleaning a pair of jittery Atari paddle controllers and reading an article about reproducing damaged Vectrex labels I thought: How cool would it be to have a custom My Little Pony Vectrex control panel! After some digging I found a scale vector of the original overlay and swiped a few vectors of Princess Luna and the night sky from google. I'm not really into the gamer Luna joke but she just seemed like the most appropriate candidate and besides, who doesn't like Luna? The design process was somewhat uninteresting inspite of the progress reports I kept annoying my friends with. It basically consisted of changing colors and rearranging everything to look nice.

I didn't even try to remove the original label carefully and just tore it off and tediously removed the adhesive. While I had everything apart I cleaned all the buttons and both potentiometers. Cutting and installing the spring (extracted from a Packman cart) was surprisingly easy, and if it weren't for the new overlay you would never know it was restored.

The label, however, did not print as nicely as I had hoped it would. I used a pretty generic shipping label paper and the colors are a bit dark and don't seem to register as well as they could. Ultimately I decided that the quality would probably not be any better using a more expensive paper so I chose the best ones and carefully cut them out. I learned that it is easier to cut the adhesive paper first and then the paper it sticks too. If you try to cut both at once it will tear. They were a little big but the buttons lined up nicely so I just cut the edges on the next one a little further. I sprayed it down with enough fixative to make it bullet proof, slapped it on the controller and that was the end of that.

This was a fun project and I would like to find more things to fo like this. I tend to get sort of depressed this time of year if I don't keep my self distracted.

I nabbed the Luna art here: http://tamalesyatole.deviantart.com/art/Luna-Philosophizing-308136918 But I can't seem to find the other resources again!