About the two chips at 7:30: - "Interstate Electronics ASA 16": It's a 16-channel audio spectrum analyzer used for speech recognition. Other products also paired it with the 6803. - "SSI 263 P": Phoneme-based speech synthesizer from Silicon Systems Inc. (acquired by Texas Instruments). It's also known as the "Votrax SC-02" chip and it was used in arcade machines, terminals and add-ons for home computers such as the TRS-80 (speech module) and Apple II (Mockingboard & Phasor sound cards).
The guys in Kraftwerk DIY'd a speech synthesiser in the 80s using that exact voice chip, and even have a patent for it. It's all over their album The Mix, particularly songs like The Robots.
So why does the Votrax SC-01 sound better then? Or is that just my own opinion? Or did they intentionally make the SC-02 in the Halcyon sound like a constipated robot that's low on battery?
@@senilyDeluxe There is an art to crafting good sounding speech with one of these chips. Maybe they just didn't have the budget or skill to use anything other than a simple text-to-speech algorithm to drive it.
@@senilyDeluxe The speech it generates is dependent on the data its being fed. It isn't just a matter of "say this" and the the chip says it. It is being sent a very intricate series of commands for each annunciation like a noise generator would.
@@xotmatrix True, I used to work for Votrax. Apparently they got a complaint one day that the chip "spoke with an accent" of some kind. One of their lead engineers whipped up samples that made it talk in all kinds of different accents, english, french, german, etc to show that the chip was just doing what it was told and didn't have an inherent accent.
Since the laser disc players on arcade games wear out so quickly, there are fewer and fewer of them left working. Add to that some discs suffer from laser rot and degrade over time (fortunately none of my LD disc games have rot) and they are becoming rarer and rarer. Fortunately, there is a solid state replacement for the laser disc player in the Dexter board, and it works as a replacement for most (all?) known LD games. The Dexter people have dumped non-rotted "raw" LD images for all the games, including Thayer's Quest. While the board isn't cheap, it's way cheaper than sourcing a working industrial LD player and locating original discs without rot. After that board came out, CA Extreme finally had like a dozen working classic LD arcade games whereas previous years you'd be lucky to have four games working, and they'd usually glitch out before the end of the show.
Yea apparently Dexter is used in large establishments (Galloping Ghost Illinois?) to keep Dragons Lair running. It's such a cool product, considering "bit rot" and laser disc players are not available and unreliable (if broken)... I seriously love these kinds of projects that replace old tech with new, but keep the old tech feeling intact. Cheers for now.
they need to dump atari cops arcade , NFL Football CED Disc 1 is Los Angeles Raiders vs. San Diego Chargers. Disc 2 is Dallas Cowboys vs. Washington Redskins.
Laserdiscs alone are incredibly rare, at least where I am from, and the ones I have found are very expensive Japanese imports of movies from the late 80s to mid 90s, I can't imagine how rare an American VIDEOGAME from the 80s on LD must be!
My father has a Halcyon unit, but it's missing the boxes and headsets. Can you make a video of the inside of the keyboard? His jack needs to be resoldered to the board.
There's a German fan synchronisation of Star Trek TNG called Sinnlos im Weltraum ("senseless in space", senseless meaning brainless / silly in this context) where there's a scene where Data says "Hadn't we signed that stupid paper telling us to help everyone we wouldn't have to deal with stupid ugly aliens" and Picard answers "Still better than unemployment benefit" (also there's a scene where Picard talks about coffee. It's two minutes long and all that comes out of it is it's black, hot and really tasty. Dark black. Boiling hot. Extremely black. Coffee, dude!)
This is the first time I've seen this system in operation since I played it in my bedroom back in 1985 in Overland Park, KS. Thank you for this trip down memory lane! FWIW, the voice recognition was okay, but I preferred to just use the keypad with the Thayer's Quest card over the top. I could never remember the names of the items to summon them by speech. It was not the easiest to do on the system. Hell, I didn't even know how rare this system is until now! I just saw one last year at the National Videogame Museum around the corner here in Frisco, so I thought these were all over the place. Well, apparently not.
@@may95son My dad was at Beatty Electronics in Overland Park back then. He often brought home cutting edge computers/hardware & some of the latest home theater gear to preview before they agreed to carry a line. I had our “old” 1979 Sony Trinitron in my bedroom so he put the Halcyon there. He gave me a quick verbal demo then walked away and let me figure it out. That was the best day. I had it for a few days, I think. I got hooked on Thayer’s Quest. Dang, I was about 13 back then. Lucky me, lol!
This reminds me of Pioneer LaserActive and game console modules made for it. I watched RMC’s video about it, and it was failure probably because it was really expensive. But at least it used existing game console paltform(Megadrive and PC Engine), so it was capable of displaying graphics on its own. Plus, LaserActive was also CD player, and module itself had cartridge slot. So you weren’t limited to just laserdisc games. And if I remember correctly, games made for LaserActive contained both code and video on a single disc.
Hey ben, is this 98PaceCars halcyon? i remember talking to him years ago at MGC about it. also do you want to fix another obscenely rare laserdisc based device? i've got a matrox E-VDP. it was the US military's first (laserdisc and 286 pc based) digital trainer. i only know of 3 that exist including mine. its got a dragons lair compatible LD player in it, and ive got a copy of space ace too lol.
check out hbomberguy’s video on this for details on what it really is- thayer’s quest was SUPPOSED to be the flagship for this thing, but mostly was relegated to dragon’s lair conversion kits, but the home version was technically supposed to be THE version
Wow! I saw the episode of computer chronicles where they demoed this and it always intrigued me. I never thought that one would show up at Ben's house and we would get such a close look at the guts and games. You went above and beyond finishing the prototype to get the HALS voice working. It's a real shame that soon the laserdiscs will deteriorate to the point that they won't work at all.
Nice to see this =D I suspect the -11v and +11v you measured on the connector that carried the audio signals from, was to power an opamp on the PCB houses the RCA connectors.
What you're referring to is "laser rot", a condition whereby the glue that holds both sides of a laser disc together wears out and pockets of separated substrate causes signal degradation from the laser reflection back to the receiving sensor being either not reflected back or only partially reflected back due to the reflective material being unable to do so.
Dude, the Druid in this game is voiced by Regis Cordic. Probably known best for his work on Transformers in the 80's, as well doing voice acting for Galtar and The Golden Lance, Gobots and the 1981 Spiderman Cartoon series
29:11 Rare console prototypes with fewer than 5 units The Nintendo AVS Panasonic Disk System Addon for SNES (If it exists) The Game Boy Advance Prototype (4 button Game Boy Color) Sony 1970s Game Console Prototype Atari Jaguar 2 Atari Panther Atari Cosmos
I can't remember, but was the Phantom just a scam or was there ever even a prototype? I miss the days laughing about that thing. Just checked Wikipedia. It says "was supposedly in development" lmao.
@@endlesswanderer1753 Someone got a hold of a Phantom prototype case used in trade shows - that's apparently all they were showing off was an empty case.
The SSI-263 is a VOTRAX SC-02 which in itself is an extension/improvement of the VOTRAX SC-01 voice synthesizer which was popular in 70's/80's era "talking" pinball machines & arcade games such as Berzerk and a couple expansions for game systems/computers such as the Atari 400/800 (Alien Group Voice Box II). ...so you were spot on! Very cool to see an example of the Halcyon running in 2020 bit-rot & all. Also, don't the overlays slide in through the top of the keypad? That's probably why you were struggling to insert the overlays!
@@BenHeckHacks I'm glad you got away from element 14 sooner than later, Ben. It's better to be yourself and do your own thing, then be a cog in a machine, I say. It's the only way we can keep our soul. Keep the videos coming when YOU want them to, see what I did there? Your loyal followers aren't going anywhere. We love you man!
That is one of the more egregious examples of disc rot I’ve seen. Shame it had to happen to something so rare. I think it would still be a good candidate for Domesday Duplicator preservation, if you’re familiar at all with that project
So cool to finally see this thing in action and seeing what its actually made of. Not really real "AI" I supposed as RDI tried to market it.. Makes me wonder if the speech recognition ever got to a working state.
There's an episode of The Computer Chronicles with a couple of representatives from RDI, and one of them is *insistent* that the Halcyon really has HAL-9000 like awareness/AI :P
@@thedungeondelver Yes, that would be Rick Dyer right? Watching that video ages ago made me really wanting to believe it! The magic disappears seeing how bare-bones this thing is inside lol.
Speech recognition probably works, but likely the preamplifier is not working well, or the microphone itself is noisy. Probably a standard dynamic microphone in there, so just plugging into a PC audio in might be a good sanity check to see if it works.
@@SeanBZA Trying a different microphone is a good idea, if the standard one would pick up too much noise you'd probably still get those "huh" "Speak consistently" lines like in that Computer Chronicles video.
Holy hell. The fact people are comfortable shipping completely unreplaceable pieces of tech history like this just blows my mind. UPS lost my new SSD this week. USPS lost my $5000 unemployment check. FedEx lost the $120 FSM for my car, and he's putting enough confidence in them to ship this thing??? Ayayayyyyy
You've obviously had some bad experiences with couriers! Sorry!! I've had orders from China direct delivered to my local PO, and have never lost anything. I'm probably just lucky... So far...
I would assume the disc for Thayer's Quest is single-sided. Seeing as how it's probably the same disc that was in the arcade machine, and arcade operators weren't going to the cabinets to flip the disc to side two when a player got far enough. Of course, they planned on sequels, so it may be there's another part on the Halcyon version. Wouldn't surprise me if they used the same disc, only the arcade may have only used one side. I don't think they made too may Thayer's Quest dedicated cabinets, most were Conversions, and the membrane keyboards were pretty finicky If I recall. Furthermore, I wonder if a Dexter board could replace the laserdisc player like in the arcade machines. You could put the laserdisc files on an SD card, so you wouldn't run in to the bit rot issues or finicky laser disc players.Dexter was made by the same person who made the Daphne Emulator. Dexter boards available here: laserdisc-replacement.com/ Edit for more info, apparently the Arcade version used a double-sided disc as well, the player in the arcade was able to play both sides somehow. It may well be the same disc as the arcade, which was used to prototype the Halcyon.
@@BenHeckHacks It's true, but so was everything else in that era. This thing might have taken off if it used the RCA CED format it was originally designed for. Pioneer's Laserdisc format and the machines were far too expensive in general, which is why VHS quickly overtook it despite it being inferior in every way.
Am I the only one that prefers the Ben heck jank set up to the element 14 high production? Ben, you're one of my favourite people on this site. Keep doing what you're doing.
@@markus5862 He shoved a paperclip across a mains connection on the PSU of an IBM 7496 thinking it would turn on (it fried of course) as well as other horrible things saying he didn't care and was "in a hurry", then went and made an unreleased follow up vid (someone on EEVBlog found it) stating he didn't care about us "armchair warriors" and that "all his friends would do the same", yada yada cop-out yada.
@@markus5862 There was a rare IBM system that he got his hands on and he tried to get the power supply to work, by sticking a paperclip into what he assumed was the 'power on' contact coming from the monitor, eventually shorting the power supply.
Those machines weren't that rare. They just weren't sold to the general public. There isn't really anything too special about them, it basically a PS/2 in a PS/1 case with no hard drive because they booted off the network.
The foot pedal stuff sounds about right. I work in this space today (mostly for software and cloud products; but sometimes for hardware too), and we have to do the equivalent of that for big companies all the time (I can't say who, but you all know many of them). A basic rule of thumb is that pretty much anything you see at a trade show or in a marketing demo is completely fake unless the company specifically says it's not (and even then it's probably been photoshopped quite a bit). Even if it's interactive, it's probably still faked a bit (I've personally written code to make stuff like that work on multiple occasions).
I worked in the trade show business for 25 years. Funny stuff. Like the car company I can't name that had us use ratchet straps to crunch down the suspension to make it look better for the media. As soon as they were gone we removed them.
IIRC Cassanda Peterson(Elvira) was an investor in this, and might still have hers. This is rare. You have one of the holy grail video game consoles there.
I also have Thayer's Quest and NFL Football in possession, courtesy of a friend who needed them kept safe for the time being. He got them a few years ago from a coworker's uncle who used to own like a rental store that carried laserdisc? The store was long gone and the Uncle needed to get rid of stuff. For some reason these were in his store LD inventory, no mention, just a random discovery while later sorting the friend's new collection. No one knows why or how these were there. Sadly getting a player is never going to happen.
Well this is something you'll never see again. Definitely one of the coolest things to ever be repaired. Seems like it would have been useful everywhere EXCEPT gaming. I'm surprised there's jokes into Halcyon itself despite being a prototype.
A scene with an item used or removed would have separate animation and graphics, allowing for 2 additional audio tracks, again without lip sync. Audio tracks were encoded into the left and right channels of a stereo encoding, therefore only monaural audio would be played from any given instance of a scene.
Super interesting. More Don Bluth animation it seems? Bit rotten laserdisc... Amazing actually seeing the results of bit rot. Its pretty sad in a lot of ways... Hopefully someone has ripped this disc for historic reasons. Thanks for the video Ben. As always.
Also of note, if quicktime FMV games are your bag, Thayer's Quest was eventually released as a series of games called "Shadoan" on the PC and Mac, and in 2008, Thayer's Quest was released for DVD players (it plays with the remote, sans computer voice control).
That NFL game video quality actually looks very good on that monitor. The effect it has is a movie or tv show from the 70s where to show a tv set, they would just optically composite film onto it and the lack of flickering and scanlines gave away that it wasn't a real tv broadcast.
I'm all on board for low production quality honestly, I don't think higher production would add anything to the content and I prefer you just doing your own thing. As for the camera shake though I will say that I sometimes find it genuinely nauseating. I have to look away from the screen at times because it starts making me dizzy, which surprises me because it's such minimal movement and I don't get motion sickness under other circumstances. Anyway, I never planned on mentioning it but since you brought it up I though I'd offer my two cents. Excellent content either way, I really admire and appreciate that you're so willing to share your knowledge.
That C128 cold spray thing at CES reminds me of Intel's 2018 Computex debacle, where they overclocked a 28-core workstation Xeon chip and cooled it with an industrial chiller, trying to sell it to the audience as "wow, look at this great, new product".
It was an IMSAI 8080 not an Altair. And the voice was just a recording of John Wood (the actor who played professor Falcon) they had him say all the words backward (game a play we shall) and then edited them back into the correct order so it would sound “computery”.
A former co-worker told me about developing one of Bally's first microprocessor powered pinball games. In order to make it work they had to over-clock the Z80 processor, and the eproms. The access time on the eproms wasn't quite good enough, but they discovered that they would work if the chips were exposed to light (not UV). So they put a 60W bulb inside of the game and took it to a show to demo it. It worked fine, until the bulb burned out!
awesome system for what it is, one thing I noticed is that the "voice" actually has a cadence to it; almost like it's "singing" instead of speaking, very common for back then.
I remember seeing a Halcyon when i was a kid in vancouver. If i am honest I think it was at Expo 86 in some technology exhibition, but that seems a bit too late, so it would have been a little earlier in some other technology show. I was less than 10 years old for sure, and I specifically remember this game being played.
I'm fairly sure your story about Commodore C128 at CES isn't true. Bill Herd has talked about the C128 a fair bit (since he was the principle hardware designer), and the only thing remotely like that he mentioned is one of the developers who wrote some of the software used a prototype with a chip that he only could get to work by putting an ice cube in a metal cup on top of it, and got something like 15 minutes run time. (Of course, the production chip turned out to be different and the software had to be hurriedly rewritten, but that was Commodore back in the day.)
the year is 2029: a rare advanced microcomputer systems prototype finds it's way to ben's door step on a dark and stormy night, along with electrodes, bolts, a tesla coil and frankenstein stickers, in exactly 4 days and 20 hours, THE WORLD'S FIRST PORTABLE LASERDISC VIDEO GAME SYSTEM SPRINGS TO LIFE WITH A CRACKLE OF RIFA CAPS and somewhere in the distance.... ah'll be back
I wonder if the size of the box was just to make it fit on top of a laserdisc player and fit into a typical home entertainment system of the era, and they jsut made it look like there was some expansion potential to get people excited.
There's also some kind of edge connector on the back that doesn't appear to go anywhere, maybe they were planning some kind of future graphics expansion?
If you want to know why it cost $2500, most of that was the cost of the Laserdisc player itself, a professional-grade unit which retailed for $1,995 back in 1984.
It is not meant as a passthrough audio device - the instruction page specifically says to connect the videodisc audio outputs to an amplifier - it does not show connecting the audio to the halcyon at all.
24:35 Halcyon: Do you want to play Thayer's Quest?
Ben: No, let's play Global Thermonuclear War
Nice nice reference
Wow! I actually did say that when recording but cut it out for time purposes.
@@BenHeckHacks well you know Mathew Broderick does love his talking computers
Yeah, I was hoping he would use Joshua as a name lol
Why not a nice game of chess?
About the two chips at 7:30:
- "Interstate Electronics ASA 16": It's a 16-channel audio spectrum analyzer used for speech recognition. Other products also paired it with the 6803.
- "SSI 263 P": Phoneme-based speech synthesizer from Silicon Systems Inc. (acquired by Texas Instruments). It's also known as the "Votrax SC-02" chip and it was used in arcade machines, terminals and add-ons for home computers such as the TRS-80 (speech module) and Apple II (Mockingboard & Phasor sound cards).
The guys in Kraftwerk DIY'd a speech synthesiser in the 80s using that exact voice chip, and even have a patent for it. It's all over their album The Mix, particularly songs like The Robots.
So why does the Votrax SC-01 sound better then? Or is that just my own opinion? Or did they intentionally make the SC-02 in the Halcyon sound like a constipated robot that's low on battery?
@@senilyDeluxe There is an art to crafting good sounding speech with one of these chips. Maybe they just didn't have the budget or skill to use anything other than a simple text-to-speech algorithm to drive it.
@@senilyDeluxe The speech it generates is dependent on the data its being fed. It isn't just a matter of "say this" and the the chip says it. It is being sent a very intricate series of commands for each annunciation like a noise generator would.
@@xotmatrix True, I used to work for Votrax. Apparently they got a complaint one day that the chip "spoke with an accent" of some kind. One of their lead engineers whipped up samples that made it talk in all kinds of different accents, english, french, german, etc to show that the chip was just doing what it was told and didn't have an inherent accent.
Even though it's super niche I'm going to design a little PCB for the audio hack that people can pull off my Github if they need to.
Do you own this or are you just borrowing it?
@@pompshuffle562 It's a loaner; he mentioned it at the start.
@@FalbertForester ah must have missed that
@@FalbertForester i was gonna say cause something that rare must cost a pretty penny
This looks to provide seconds of fun.
not consecutive.
The football game was interesting. But it really suffers with no on screen graphics for yards and downs.
Since the laser disc players on arcade games wear out so quickly, there are fewer and fewer of them left working. Add to that some discs suffer from laser rot and degrade over time (fortunately none of my LD disc games have rot) and they are becoming rarer and rarer. Fortunately, there is a solid state replacement for the laser disc player in the Dexter board, and it works as a replacement for most (all?) known LD games. The Dexter people have dumped non-rotted "raw" LD images for all the games, including Thayer's Quest. While the board isn't cheap, it's way cheaper than sourcing a working industrial LD player and locating original discs without rot. After that board came out, CA Extreme finally had like a dozen working classic LD arcade games whereas previous years you'd be lucky to have four games working, and they'd usually glitch out before the end of the show.
Yea apparently Dexter is used in large establishments (Galloping Ghost Illinois?) to keep Dragons Lair running. It's such a cool product, considering "bit rot" and laser disc players are not available and unreliable (if broken)... I seriously love these kinds of projects that replace old tech with new, but keep the old tech feeling intact. Cheers for now.
they need to dump atari cops arcade , NFL Football CED Disc 1 is Los Angeles Raiders vs. San Diego Chargers. Disc 2 is Dallas Cowboys vs. Washington Redskins.
Wonder if it could be used for the pioneer Laseractive.
Laserdiscs alone are incredibly rare, at least where I am from, and the ones I have found are very expensive Japanese imports of movies from the late 80s to mid 90s, I can't imagine how rare an American VIDEOGAME from the 80s on LD must be!
“Welcome to Halcyon, do you want to play Thayers Quest? “ Ben: Not really.
Had my laughing hard!
It's an arduous game. When I was unemployed last year, I spent a month and completed it. The DVD PC port, obviously.
My father has a Halcyon unit, but it's missing the boxes and headsets. Can you make a video of the inside of the keyboard? His jack needs to be resoldered to the board.
Wesley Crusher and the amazing technicolor starfleet uniform made my day
There's a German fan synchronisation of Star Trek TNG called Sinnlos im Weltraum ("senseless in space", senseless meaning brainless / silly in this context) where there's a scene where Data says "Hadn't we signed that stupid paper telling us to help everyone we wouldn't have to deal with stupid ugly aliens" and Picard answers "Still better than unemployment benefit"
(also there's a scene where Picard talks about coffee. It's two minutes long and all that comes out of it is it's black, hot and really tasty. Dark black. Boiling hot. Extremely black. Coffee, dude!)
This is the first time I've seen this system in operation since I played it in my bedroom back in 1985 in Overland Park, KS. Thank you for this trip down memory lane! FWIW, the voice recognition was okay, but I preferred to just use the keypad with the Thayer's Quest card over the top. I could never remember the names of the items to summon them by speech. It was not the easiest to do on the system. Hell, I didn't even know how rare this system is until now! I just saw one last year at the National Videogame Museum around the corner here in Frisco, so I thought these were all over the place. Well, apparently not.
You lucky bastard, how did you get it?
@@may95son My dad was at Beatty Electronics in Overland Park back then. He often brought home cutting edge computers/hardware & some of the latest home theater gear to preview before they agreed to carry a line.
I had our “old” 1979 Sony Trinitron in my bedroom so he put the Halcyon there. He gave me a quick verbal demo then walked away and let me figure it out. That was the best day. I had it for a few days, I think. I got hooked on Thayer’s Quest.
Dang, I was about 13 back then. Lucky me, lol!
How rich were your parents?!
Some of the early N64 demos were being run by not-very-well concealed SGI workstations under a tablecloth.
And quite a few games carried the tradition up until even the last few years running off workstations of "in game footage"
@lass kinn and used assets that would actually be used in the game and not cg movies pre-rendered at well beyond the console's capabilities
"actual in-game footage"
yeah, sure, that's why people shouldn't preorder anything
"Did you also know? HAL is IBM if you switch every letter by one in the alphabet."
holy crap.
There weren't that many companies that made computers AND rifle-barrels around back when 2001 was written. ;-)
@@AmstradExin zenith? i bet zenith or maybe yamaha did, wouldnt put it past rca either
SAL was the female
@vctjkhme did you know that if you take the penis out of penis it spells your ma's face? yoooo
This reminds me of Pioneer LaserActive and game console modules made for it. I watched RMC’s video about it, and it was failure probably because it was really expensive. But at least it used existing game console paltform(Megadrive and PC Engine), so it was capable of displaying graphics on its own. Plus, LaserActive was also CD player, and module itself had cartridge slot. So you weren’t limited to just laserdisc games.
And if I remember correctly, games made for LaserActive contained both code and video on a single disc.
Hey ben, is this 98PaceCars halcyon? i remember talking to him years ago at MGC about it. also do you want to fix another obscenely rare laserdisc based device? i've got a matrox E-VDP. it was the US military's first (laserdisc and 286 pc based) digital trainer. i only know of 3 that exist including mine. its got a dragons lair compatible LD player in it, and ive got a copy of space ace too lol.
Lucky!
Send him a mail, and let's see what can be achieved.
Everyone like this comment so he can see it. I love seeing old military tech
No - this is not 98PaceCar's Halcyon.
Next he’s going to pull a unicorn from his ear..
How did they let you keep this/take this home. Belongs in a museum.
Fascinating and good teardown, easy to see that why it's ultra rare because it's ultra crappy.
It was also insanely expensive and...yeah many people didn't even think it made it to market.
@@GELTONZ It didn’t make it to market.
@@viktorreznov4718 it did
@@emmanuelmckoy5899 Where?
@@viktorreznov4718 stores
OH MY GOD
It's pretty crazy to see this thing actually existing after that video you made
RIGHT?
me: i wonder if hbomb has seen this video
first comment: *hbomb freaking out*
"Oh good, he's seen it"
hbomb i will pay you or whoever created it for the homeless tweaker shelter shirt 3d asset please i need it
check out hbomberguy’s video on this for details on what it really is- thayer’s quest was SUPPOSED to be the flagship for this thing, but mostly was relegated to dragon’s lair conversion kits, but the home version was technically supposed to be THE version
omg
Do you have a link? Couldn't find it. Think my TH-cam is playing up
@@jamesnewbould2469 th-cam.com/video/CnPOQr1pxY8/w-d-xo.html
I was so invested in the Chargers and Raiders game!
Wow! I saw the episode of computer chronicles where they demoed this and it always intrigued me. I never thought that one would show up at Ben's house and we would get such a close look at the guts and games. You went above and beyond finishing the prototype to get the HALS voice working. It's a real shame that soon the laserdiscs will deteriorate to the point that they won't work at all.
As long as someone creates an image or .ISO of the laserdisc before it succumbs to bit rot, will it be recoverable.
Nice to see this =D I suspect the -11v and +11v you measured on the connector that carried the audio signals from, was to power an opamp on the PCB houses the RCA connectors.
Nice to see you here :-D
@@PrawnCocktailBro Ditto =D
Ben, I am impressed with both your electrical aptitude, and your ability to recall lyrics from Broadway scores. You are a god among men, sir!
What you're referring to is "laser rot", a condition whereby the glue that holds both sides of a laser disc together wears out and pockets of separated substrate causes signal degradation from the laser reflection back to the receiving sensor being either not reflected back or only partially reflected back due to the reflective material being unable to do so.
It's technically not "bit rot" either because the laserdisc video signal is analog and not digital.
Little bits of the disc have rotted, so I think we can still call it bit rot.
I think you're about 20 years late on trying to promote "laser rot" instead of "bit rot". I have heard "disc rot" before.
Man, at least you don't have to worry about copyright strikes with the audio being that bad!
He might get a strike by Merzbow.
Stephen Hawking’s estate disagree😂
"Look at these graphics!", probably took a week to render on an SGI Iris 😂
Or they used an analog computer and rendered it in realtime?
1 week and several kilowatts just from the GPU alone. Had one of the dual rack mount units, minus the $36,000 gpu. Was kind of a deal breaker.
@@rudolfrieder186 _"Or they used an analog computer and rendered it in realtime?"_
a.k.a. scanimate.
Dude, the Druid in this game is voiced by Regis Cordic. Probably known best for his work on Transformers in the 80's, as well doing voice acting for Galtar and The Golden Lance, Gobots and the 1981 Spiderman Cartoon series
No classic electronic is complete without a Beeper Booper.
29:11 Rare console prototypes with fewer than 5 units
The Nintendo AVS
Panasonic Disk System Addon for SNES (If it exists)
The Game Boy Advance Prototype (4 button Game Boy Color)
Sony 1970s Game Console Prototype
Atari Jaguar 2
Atari Panther
Atari Cosmos
Wonder if the Indrema L600 has a working prototype out there somewhere. That would be pretty rare.
I can't remember, but was the Phantom just a scam or was there ever even a prototype? I miss the days laughing about that thing.
Just checked Wikipedia. It says "was supposedly in development" lmao.
How many of those Nintendo 64 "floppy disk" systems were made?
@@Stoney3K in Japan? Enough since it was actually released. There is one prototype US version that I know of.
@@endlesswanderer1753 Someone got a hold of a Phantom prototype case used in trade shows - that's apparently all they were showing off was an empty case.
"Did you go to the bathroom Rogers? Please insert the disc..." - I can't do that Dave.
The SSI-263 is a VOTRAX SC-02 which in itself is an extension/improvement of the VOTRAX SC-01 voice synthesizer which was popular in 70's/80's era "talking" pinball machines & arcade games such as Berzerk and a couple expansions for game systems/computers such as the Atari 400/800 (Alien Group Voice Box II).
...so you were spot on! Very cool to see an example of the Halcyon running in 2020 bit-rot & all.
Also, don't the overlays slide in through the top of the keypad? That's probably why you were struggling to insert the overlays!
"0 production values. Let the camera shake."
Great to know. Sending a box of seasick vomit from under my desk your way.
No problem just make sure it's COVID free.
@@BenHeckHacks As soon as I stop shaking with laughter. XD
@@BenHeckHacks I'm glad you got away from element 14 sooner than later, Ben. It's better to be yourself and do your own thing, then be a cog in a machine, I say. It's the only way we can keep our soul. Keep the videos coming when YOU want them to, see what I did there? Your loyal followers aren't going anywhere. We love you man!
I've been waiting for a good laserdisc involved episode. Thank you LaserDisc gods!!
That is one of the more egregious examples of disc rot I’ve seen. Shame it had to happen to something so rare. I think it would still be a good candidate for Domesday Duplicator preservation, if you’re familiar at all with that project
Fairly disappointed that the cat wasn't in the box
Greetings, Professor Falken.
Those graphics in that era at home would have been epic.
I'd say it's technically footage from a "Fancy VCR" (C) 2020 MattMcMuscles
So cool to finally see this thing in action and seeing what its actually made of. Not really real "AI" I supposed as RDI tried to market it.. Makes me wonder if the speech recognition ever got to a working state.
There's an episode of The Computer Chronicles with a couple of representatives from RDI, and one of them is *insistent* that the Halcyon really has HAL-9000 like awareness/AI :P
@@thedungeondelver Yes, that would be Rick Dyer right? Watching that video ages ago made me really wanting to believe it! The magic disappears seeing how bare-bones this thing is inside lol.
@@5kogur Yes! Here's the video, with a time stamp of where the Halcyon demo comes in.
th-cam.com/video/uDR6lw4uYFY/w-d-xo.html
Speech recognition probably works, but likely the preamplifier is not working well, or the microphone itself is noisy. Probably a standard dynamic microphone in there, so just plugging into a PC audio in might be a good sanity check to see if it works.
@@SeanBZA Trying a different microphone is a good idea, if the standard one would pick up too much noise you'd probably still get those "huh" "Speak consistently" lines like in that Computer Chronicles video.
Holy hell. The fact people are comfortable shipping completely unreplaceable pieces of tech history like this just blows my mind. UPS lost my new SSD this week. USPS lost my $5000 unemployment check. FedEx lost the $120 FSM for my car, and he's putting enough confidence in them to ship this thing??? Ayayayyyyy
You've obviously had some bad experiences with couriers! Sorry!! I've had orders from China direct delivered to my local PO, and have never lost anything. I'm probably just lucky... So far...
now imagine sending that to the 8-bit guy :P
@@pezr6336 ha! That would be an interesting colab...
Love how u basically completed it yourself.
Halcyon, didn't know or care. But Ben made me now know and care! Thanks Ben.
Halcyon is one of my favourite words/birds/and track by Orbital!
I would assume the disc for Thayer's Quest is single-sided. Seeing as how it's probably the same disc that was in the arcade machine, and arcade operators weren't going to the cabinets to flip the disc to side two when a player got far enough. Of course, they planned on sequels, so it may be there's another part on the Halcyon version. Wouldn't surprise me if they used the same disc, only the arcade may have only used one side. I don't think they made too may Thayer's Quest dedicated cabinets, most were Conversions, and the membrane keyboards were pretty finicky If I recall. Furthermore, I wonder if a Dexter board could replace the laserdisc player like in the arcade machines. You could put the laserdisc files on an SD card, so you wouldn't run in to the bit rot issues or finicky laser disc players.Dexter was made by the same person who made the Daphne Emulator. Dexter boards available here: laserdisc-replacement.com/
Edit for more info, apparently the Arcade version used a double-sided disc as well, the player in the arcade was able to play both sides somehow. It may well be the same disc as the arcade, which was used to prototype the Halcyon.
It's easy to rag on this old tech, but this was more advanced than anything else available at the time.
Ehhhhh.... Laserdisc aside the tech is late 70s at best.
@@BenHeckHacks It's true, but so was everything else in that era. This thing might have taken off if it used the RCA CED format it was originally designed for. Pioneer's Laserdisc format and the machines were far too expensive in general, which is why VHS quickly overtook it despite it being inferior in every way.
Am I the only one that prefers the Ben heck jank set up to the element 14 high production?
Ben, you're one of my favourite people on this site. Keep doing what you're doing.
Only 5 remain because 8-Bit Guy shoved paperclips into the rest of them. XD
Stone cold. Pretty nuts how that video just destroyed his reputation. I really liked him, too.
@@endlesswanderer1753 wow, what happened? What did he do and on what system?
@@markus5862 He shoved a paperclip across a mains connection on the PSU of an IBM 7496 thinking it would turn on (it fried of course) as well as other horrible things saying he didn't care and was "in a hurry", then went and made an unreleased follow up vid (someone on EEVBlog found it) stating he didn't care about us "armchair warriors" and that "all his friends would do the same", yada yada cop-out yada.
@@markus5862 There was a rare IBM system that he got his hands on and he tried to get the power supply to work, by sticking a paperclip into what he assumed was the 'power on' contact coming from the monitor, eventually shorting the power supply.
Those machines weren't that rare. They just weren't sold to the general public. There isn't really anything too special about them, it basically a PS/2 in a PS/1 case with no hard drive because they booted off the network.
Dude that WB opening from Gremlins was a nostalgia trip I didn't know I could have.
The foot pedal stuff sounds about right. I work in this space today (mostly for software and cloud products; but sometimes for hardware too), and we have to do the equivalent of that for big companies all the time (I can't say who, but you all know many of them). A basic rule of thumb is that pretty much anything you see at a trade show or in a marketing demo is completely fake unless the company specifically says it's not (and even then it's probably been photoshopped quite a bit). Even if it's interactive, it's probably still faked a bit (I've personally written code to make stuff like that work on multiple occasions).
I worked in the trade show business for 25 years. Funny stuff. Like the car company I can't name that had us use ratchet straps to crunch down the suspension to make it look better for the media. As soon as they were gone we removed them.
the MSX systen got laserdisc support, there are some good games
Yeah and with the TMS9918 in the MSX they could easily overlay graphics and video.
WANT WANT WANT the RDI Halcyon. I’ve been trying to track on down for DECADES !!!
IIRC Cassanda Peterson(Elvira) was an investor in this, and might still have hers. This is rare. You have one of the holy grail video game consoles there.
I so missed Ben, glad I found him again
31:02 - The Halcyon is happy to finally be working after four decades.
I love that robotic speech synthesizer so much.
You can't fool us. That's just a dvd player and you're really tiny.
My new head canon-pocket-sized Ben
No one at my work ever gets the "WHAT'S IN THE BOX?!" reference. I'm glad to hear it.
8:00 "Ahhh, Hello Computer!"
The irony of it being a Macintosh and its macDraw reveal! Such a missed chance to have microphones built into the mouse.
Suddenly i feel the urge to play a game of chess and say "As you command, Megatron" all at once.. I love speech synthesizers of that era
The football game is actually much more interesting. I would dig messing around with that at a bar with some buddies.
I thought the same thing. It would have blown my dad's mind.
There was a fmv football game for the Sega saturn this reminded me of. I think mike ditka was in it
Good ole Quarterback Attack
I just rather buy you beer Ben and listen to your stories about electronic stuff.
The Atari Holographic game system is pretty damn rare. Also try finding the MindLink controller.
By holographic game system, you mean the Atari Cosmos?
Fun to watch old historical prototypes like that. Hope the robot voices doesn't give you nightmares.
I also have Thayer's Quest and NFL Football in possession, courtesy of a friend who needed them kept safe for the time being. He got them a few years ago from a coworker's uncle who used to own like a rental store that carried laserdisc? The store was long gone and the Uncle needed to get rid of stuff. For some reason these were in his store LD inventory, no mention, just a random discovery while later sorting the friend's new collection. No one knows why or how these were there. Sadly getting a player is never going to happen.
Well this is something you'll never see again. Definitely one of the coolest things to ever be repaired. Seems like it would have been useful everywhere EXCEPT gaming. I'm surprised there's jokes into Halcyon itself despite being a prototype.
LaserDisc Return of the Jedi and Akira are the highest fidelity, unmolested versions of the films.
A scene with an item used or removed would have separate animation and graphics, allowing for 2 additional audio tracks, again without lip sync.
Audio tracks were encoded into the left and right channels of a stereo encoding, therefore only monaural audio would be played from any given instance of a scene.
You might want to encapsulate that chunk of the Berlin Wall. At least some parts of it were made of asbestos concrete.
I'll resist the urge to angle grind it. It's actually got little bits of graffiti on one side, it's cool.
Super interesting. More Don Bluth animation it seems? Bit rotten laserdisc... Amazing actually seeing the results of bit rot. Its pretty sad in a lot of ways... Hopefully someone has ripped this disc for historic reasons. Thanks for the video Ben. As always.
Also of note, if quicktime FMV games are your bag, Thayer's Quest was eventually released as a series of games called "Shadoan" on the PC and Mac, and in 2008, Thayer's Quest was released for DVD players (it plays with the remote, sans computer voice control).
That NFL game video quality actually looks very good on that monitor. The effect it has is a movie or tv show from the 70s where to show a tv set, they would just optically composite film onto it and the lack of flickering and scanlines gave away that it wasn't a real tv broadcast.
LD was good quality. Yes it's technically still a composite interlaced signal but it's not that far behind DVD.
Finally, you have had a shave! YAY!!! Professor Stephen Hawking would be well impressed with the Halcyon Game System. Sounds just like him.
Ben: Only 5 are known to exist, and this is one of them
Me: Holy sh@t
Ben in perfect time: Yeah
I'm all on board for low production quality honestly, I don't think higher production would add anything to the content and I prefer you just doing your own thing. As for the camera shake though I will say that I sometimes find it genuinely nauseating. I have to look away from the screen at times because it starts making me dizzy, which surprises me because it's such minimal movement and I don't get motion sickness under other circumstances. Anyway, I never planned on mentioning it but since you brought it up I though I'd offer my two cents.
Excellent content either way, I really admire and appreciate that you're so willing to share your knowledge.
I could solve that with an IR remote for the camera. It shakes from me pressing record.
I don’t care at all about the Halcyon but I need more Star Trek / Broadway mashups. Please more singing Ben, it’s the good stuff!
19:46 "the travelling pants" XD Someone need to make an "out of context" compilation video
That C128 cold spray thing at CES reminds me of Intel's 2018 Computex debacle, where they overclocked a 28-core workstation Xeon chip and cooled it with an industrial chiller, trying to sell it to the audience as "wow, look at this great, new product".
Did anyone else get Wargames vibes? "Do you want to play a game of Thermo-nuclear War?"
Weirdly enough, the computer in the movie (An Altair 8800) probably used the exact same speech chip...
It was an IMSAI 8080 not an Altair. And the voice was just a recording of John Wood (the actor who played professor Falcon) they had him say all the words backward (game a play we shall) and then edited them back into the correct order so it would sound “computery”.
@@sideburn I believe they used an IMSAI in the movie, but it was an Altair in the book.
Tuned in for the rare console. Stayed for the reworked broadway tunes.
The "bit rot" enhances this thing's identity as a premise for a horror film.
The Brotherhood of Warring Jeans sounds like a good movie.
A former co-worker told me about developing one of Bally's first microprocessor powered pinball games. In order to make it work they had to over-clock the Z80 processor, and the eproms. The access time on the eproms wasn't quite good enough, but they discovered that they would work if the chips were exposed to light (not UV). So they put a 60W bulb inside of the game and took it to a show to demo it. It worked fine, until the bulb burned out!
Amazing. I wonder what the science is behind light speeding up the EPROMS?
@@BenHeckHacks It's the heat.
Lol my Macintosh 512 is on and the talking moose keeps talking and sounds exactly like the halcyon it’s like they’re talking to eachother 😂
now fire up DOS and get Dr. Sbaitso running
The Konix Multisystem was pretty rare. lol
awesome system for what it is, one thing I noticed is that the "voice" actually has a cadence to it; almost like it's "singing" instead of speaking, very common for back then.
Very fascinating! The NFL game was very unique
I remember seeing a Halcyon when i was a kid in vancouver. If i am honest I think it was at Expo 86 in some technology exhibition, but that seems a bit too late, so it would have been a little earlier in some other technology show. I was less than 10 years old for sure, and I specifically remember this game being played.
I'm fairly sure your story about Commodore C128 at CES isn't true. Bill Herd has talked about the C128 a fair bit (since he was the principle hardware designer), and the only thing remotely like that he mentioned is one of the developers who wrote some of the software used a prototype with a chip that he only could get to work by putting an ice cube in a metal cup on top of it, and got something like 15 minutes run time. (Of course, the production chip turned out to be different and the software had to be hurriedly rewritten, but that was Commodore back in the day.)
the year is 2029: a rare advanced microcomputer systems prototype finds it's way to ben's door step on a dark and stormy night, along with electrodes, bolts, a tesla coil and frankenstein stickers, in exactly 4 days and 20 hours, THE WORLD'S FIRST PORTABLE LASERDISC VIDEO GAME SYSTEM SPRINGS TO LIFE WITH A CRACKLE OF RIFA CAPS and somewhere in the distance.... ah'll be back
I wonder if the size of the box was just to make it fit on top of a laserdisc player and fit into a typical home entertainment system of the era, and they jsut made it look like there was some expansion potential to get people excited.
Oh without a doubt. It's the same size as the LD-700 player. Even with a mixer it's still 30% empty.
There's also some kind of edge connector on the back that doesn't appear to go anywhere, maybe they were planning some kind of future graphics expansion?
If you want to know why it cost $2500, most of that was the cost of the Laserdisc player itself, a professional-grade unit which retailed for $1,995 back in 1984.
Yeah the console itself was pretty basic.
The color Vectrex prototype is rare. Only one in existence.
It isn't hard to see why this never got off the ground
"Your player now has concussion" brilliant 🙌
Awesome! This was on my childhood wish list along with the Vectrex!
To think this would’ve been the first video game console that asked if it you were in the bathroom is pretty nuts.
As a Scottish person I now have a very vague understanding of how American football works 👍
I imagine the poor thing trying to understand the glaswegian accent 😁
@@ryuken7129 m.th-cam.com/video/sAz_UvnUeuU/w-d-xo.html
Omfg that was hilarious thank you very much for the share
I was impressed by that cgi warner brothers logo and the nfl intro.
I have a piece of the Berlin wall too! Checkpoint Charlie!
It is not meant as a passthrough audio device - the instruction page specifically says to connect the videodisc audio outputs to an amplifier - it does not show connecting the audio to the halcyon at all.
Great to see it, good job Ben, as usual!
Anyone else waiting for it to say "Would you like to play a game?"
Yes.
Star Trek jokes never gets old.
Interesting and weird system, is fun how this thing was as a glimpse of the future on that era.
Dragon's Lair, on that would be epic. But I can't wait till you have a Sharp X68000 pro series or a SGI Octane or Indigo!
I did a Sharp X68000 video about 3 months ago