- I used this on the Atari computers.
The Apple version included a card with an 8 bit DAC on it that sounded pretty good. The Atari 8 bit computers have a primitive Amiga like set of 4 bit DAC channels. SAM used one of those and also sounded pretty good, though not quite as good as the Apple did.
And let's be clear, none of them were great, but speech synth in the 80's was near magic so people largely did not care.
Never used this tool with a C64.
- Yes. Agree
- I agree! This is my first time seeing this device.
- Cool! I want to play with this a bit.
What happens on a monochrome display?
Panel vs CRT. Can a CRT even do this with the fidelity needed.
My phone has an irregular pattern of AMOLED emitters. Text could be formed, but it would look odd.
- Great write up. I have stumbled into the vast majority of these.
Getting a good color CRT photo is hard!
Monochrome one are a lot easier and for me, were good practice.
- Wow! That game is fantastic! All the clever analog means and methods combined to yield what appears to be a very compelling game experience, especially for the time period.
I will definitely want to play this should the opportunity ever arise.
The thing I love about methods like this is how robust they are. When your system is running on the rules of the world, so many things just blend to work. It is a bit of magic.
For a similar thing, and to get at the magic part, look up the Disney sodium lamp compositing system.
It was recently recreated and it can combine video images that trouble even our best digital capabilities. Analog baby! It has its place still.
https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk?si=m7lv4MjC_TypFUHx
Yet another example might be the automatons. Some were created to perform handwriting using cams, levers, linkages and gears! It is crazy what can actually be done.
https://youtu.be/zpJEP6O6-Ho?si=p8rVqxhWQ9ySqiWa
Fran by the way, along with Sarah at the Seattle Telephony Connections Museum, are among my favorite people in the world. They are humble, and love tech and to share and it is just nice to learn from them.
Analog, relay based switching is crazy, and yet another example I will leave you all to seek out as you may be inclined to do.
- It was.
- I have not yet looked through the archive so forgive me it's this question doesn't make sense. But I didn't want it to be forgotten. Are you archiving current offerings like Fuji net various video and sound cards that are out there?
- I'm looking forward to reading this. A nice little piece of bbsing history that I know nothing about. Thank you for working on it.
- BASIC on the early 8, and more generally 16 bit machines was quite a bit more empowering than pop media tends to speak to.
My uncle Bob (seriously, I have the generic uncle "Bob"), developed real estate contracts using a combination of C64 BASIC and some word processor that allowed for conditional and parametric document assembly, almost Word Perfect style!
He built up quite a business with those efforts!
A bit later a friend wrote an entire trucking business on the PC running GWBASIC.
I myself started out on a beat up Atari 400 with the Atari BASIC cartridge and the cassette storage peripheral I struggle to recall the name of right now.... 410! That was it.
I wrote TV test and alignment programs. Learned all that working at a TV repair shop as a kid. The Atari had just a couple capabilities that made a huge difference too!
One of those was at least 8 grey shades. I know GTIA could deliver 16 and I ended up using them once I made enough to get a newer 800 XL machine.
Another feature was full overscan graphics. 48 bytes per line instead of 40. That made it possible to draw the full frame patterns and properly identify the safe area for viewers wanting the factory setup, and expand viewing for others without showing blank non raster regions on their screen.
Side bar:
Older sets would often under scan by quite a bit! Correcting that often meant a lot to those viewers.
End Side bar
Another feature was enough colors to calibrate a TV for good color more than close enough. I could get purity tests, set color delay phase and some other items pretty well!
Last feature was 320 pixels in the safe area NTSC. That is two pixels per color clock cycle. When set to monochrome, those pixels were just right for focus, convergence, linearity and the whole test pattern.
All this was some percent off the pro gear, but I found out most people do not care. And I mostly didn't either.
As a famous YouTube I love says, "Good enough for the girls I go out with" (AvE)
BASIC with a few PEEK and POKE commands and the occasional bit of machine language was enough to do a lot!
COMPUTE! Published a nice assembler and disassembler too. For some work, a guy could get setup well enough to produce good programs.
Getting back to XP...
I wrote the above for perspective. Of course XP can make sense. So can DOS, an Amiga, and Windows 3.11, just ask Southwest airlines.
Fact is many of us here can probably work magic with whatever gets put into our hands. I can.
And all these skills couple with microcontrollers too.
Perhaps that warrants discussion here too one day. The skills are a great match and when one can build hardware feature matched to the use case?
Boom goes the Dynamite!
- More
“Come, come, elucidate your thoughts..”
Once I had it ask the local Sherrif what time it was ...at 3AM.
No, was not my phone. I do know the peeps who contributed the phone never saw trouble. And that was after asking him again.
Yeah, I was part evil as a kid. I wish I had audio of the second call. Good grief! He was hot, but some how picked up on it being kids with a toy and gave us a scary, but hilarious earfull!
Others included dialing local James Bond numbers, and there were more than a few, and having SAM outline a brief mission after the classic, "Mr Bond? James Bond?" intro. A couple played along.
A friend had the TI with its speech system and did a few too.
One thing we learned on the TI was how misspelling things could really improve how understandable the voice was.
A girlfriend was named Teresa, as an example. Treeza worked great.