On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Hársfalvi Levente wrote:
> Steve Judd wrote:
>
> > And that brings me to my point: I'd like to see this thing go into the
> > hands of someone who will actually do something with it, instead of going
> > into someone's detestable "collection". I don't care who -- you, or
> > Richard, or Ruud are all great and worthy guys. So I'd be willing to chip
> > in some money to buy the thing; as in, I would be willing to send you $50
> > to help buy it. I fully realize that promises of money are dangerous, and
> > there's some conceivable legal issues, but in my experience most cbm
> > hacker types are honest, and obviously if several people contributed some
> > $$$ it could make a big difference.
>
> Not going into debate with your opinion, I just second your above offer:
> whoever from this group (Richard, Ruud, you or anyone) is willing to buy
> the computer, I'm gonna help him with $50.
>
> (I guess $50 is not 'that' much money; would love to see the machine in
> some of your hands. But please decide soon -- the auction will end in
> two days).
This is great. I was thinking the same things myself during some quiet
hours in the youth hostel, but I'm very pleased that other people have
also suggested the idea.
My thoughts were that the machine needs to be made accessible to all
"hackers" and even collectors who can be bothered to make the journey to
see it. I have always wanted to reverse engineer that speech interface so
that common 264 series computer owners can hack a C64 Magic Voice
(slightly) and hear the 261 words. Managed to get a pinout of the speech
glue logic ASIC round at Bo's place (with only a multimeter, which I was
quite pleased with), but really it needs some probing with an
oscilloscope.
So - this is what I will do. I will place a bid on this item, and all
donations to the "Save the V364 Fund" will be gratefully received,
assuming that the bid is successful. The machine will then be available
for people to see, should they ever find themselves in England. I will
finish off the job of reverse-engineering the MOS custom chip and (if
Nicolas Welte's ideas are correct) publish how to adapt a Magic Voice to
work in a 264 series computer. The best candidate for this would be the
C16, as you could install the MV inside the C16 case (plenty of room).
Might need upgrading to 64K, but that's easy enough.
Hey - here's an idea. What about a V364 webcam style device - video
capture on the S-Video output and some form of telnet interface to the
keyboard buffer (perhaps over RS232 using the real ACIA) - log into the
linux box controlling the device and send it "SAY" commands of your own?
Only one user at a time of course - have to implement some form of
concurrency on /dev/v364 :)
Richard
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