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A potato livecam using the ComputerEyes digitizer and the C128 VDC chip

C

ClassicHasClass

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If you can't display live-ish slow-scan digitized video on the VIC-II because it interferes, then ... put the VDC into low resolution 320x200 and use that. And then make the capture process nearly 25% faster.

oldvcr.blogspot.com

Making a potato livecam with the Commodore 128 VDC and ComputerEyes

If we're going to make the little old 8-bit MOS 6502 into Skynet — because we already know what the Terminator T-800 CPU is — then it's g...
oldvcr.blogspot.com oldvcr.blogspot.com
 
Man, it makes me feel old to remember a time whenever you went to the state fair or other similar venue you could inevitably find someone running a booth where you could get your picture taken with a ComputerEyes and printed out on a dot matrix printer. (Heck, if you were really lucky there'd be a Pepsi Challenge stand within a hundred foot radius of it.)

To kids today that must seem as quaint as those late nineteenth century world fairs and amusement parks where it was a mind-blowing attraction that the buildings were covered with light bulbs.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
To kids today that must seem as quaint as those late nineteenth century world fairs and amusement parks where it was a mind-blowing attraction that the buildings were covered with light bulbs.
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There are things the "kids" miss out on today, what about the Mercury fountain at the 1937 World's Fair:

calder.org

Mercury Fountain (1937) | Calder Foundation

The Calder Foundation is dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and interpreting the art and archives of Alexander Calder.
calder.org

These days if somebody drops a Mercury Thermometer on the floor, everybody starts screaming, evacuates the building and calls a Hazmat team.

But then they have egg on their faces when you remind them that the Amalgam fillings in their teeth are 50% metal Mercury by weight and they are swallowing grindings from that every time they eat, and that Mercury metal is "barely hazardous" though the vapor is not ideal, unlike Mercury salts in the food chain which are toxic.

Of course if we were back in the 1950's, you could buy the kids an Atomic experimenters kit complete with a scintillation chamber and some tame radioactive materials, but the world has become far too "touchy-feely" and woke to accept such things today.
 

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Eudimorphodon said:
Man, it makes me feel old to remember a time whenever you went to the state fair or other similar venue you could inevitably find someone running a booth where you could get your picture taken with a ComputerEyes and printed out on a dot matrix printer. (Heck, if you were really lucky there'd be a Pepsi Challenge stand within a hundred foot radius of it.)

To kids today that must seem as quaint as those late nineteenth century world fairs and amusement parks where it was a mind-blowing attraction that the buildings were covered with light bulbs.
Click to expand...

If you wait long enough you can blow people's minds again by setting those up at VCFs and museums :)

Hugo Holden said:
These days if somebody drops a Mercury Thermometer on the floor, everybody starts screaming, evacuates the building and calls a Hazmat team.
Click to expand...

Reminds me of the look I got when I used a mercury thermometer to measure my fever (don't let it slip when shaking it ;)) because inevitably the eletronic ones run out of juice when you need them most so it's always good to have on on hand that operates on physical principles alone

...now I want an atomic experiment kit...didn't know that was a thing
 
powerlot said:
If you wait long enough you can blow people's minds again by setting those up at VCFs and museums :)
Click to expand...

I dunno, alas. I think to the majority of kids that'll forevermore be about as exciting as watching someone knit a sock. A really low-fi sock. And they'll complain about the noise the dot matrix printer makes.

Although, I dunno, maybe it'd be more exciting if we could work mercury vapor into it somehow? Set up a booth where as you're sitting for your ComputerEyes scan you'll also get a genuine daguerreotype of the same scene?
 
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Eudimorphodon said:
I dunno, alas. I think to the majority of kids that'll forevermore be about as exciting as watching someone knit a sock. A really low-fi sock. And they'll complain about the noise the dot matrix printer makes.
Click to expand...

My similar exhibit went over pretty well at VCF East. You can see the age distribution in the pictures. A couple people seemed to like the line printer noise. I wore ear plugs when working on it at home for extended time. VCF's have high background noise level so relative to that wasn't nearly as loud as it seemed at home. For general public probably be less interest.

http://www.pdp8online.com/shows/vcfe23/index.shtml
 
I'm not quite as, uh, seasoned as Eudimorphodon, but I do remember those at the local county fair in the mid 1980s. I never got one of my own though.

In any case, this wasn't done as a VCF exhibit per se (it was mostly to see how far into realtime I could push the ComputerEyes - spoiler alert: not THAT far), but it may turn up as one.
 
My vague recollection of the “scientific” analysis of the Pepsi Challenge results is that when people in a high pressure situation are asked to choose between two single-swallow samples they usually pick the sweeter one, regardless of whether or not that’s what they’d actually want in more normal circumstances. Supposedly a similar phenomenon makes people trying to choose between two TVs in a showroom likely to think the one with the brighter picture is the “better” one.
 
ClassicHasClass said:
I'm not quite as, uh, seasoned as Eudimorphodon, but I do remember those at the local county fair in the mid 1980s. I never got one of my own though.

In any case, this wasn't done as a VCF exhibit per se (it was mostly to see how far into realtime I could push the ComputerEyes - spoiler alert: not THAT far), but it may turn up as one.
Click to expand...
The systems were typically made for the purpose and streamlined to be less “slow and clumbsy “

The first machines were the CASI Apollo VP2 (s100 bus, B&W ASCII wide carriage images)
Had a custom digitizer hand wired into some digital music memory cards and other controls.
The Compmark I Spacepix (the one that was a little faster using a line printer)

Followed by the CASI BIOs System with the Colortron pseudo color imager and printer

The later fair based capture systems were quite robust with good resolution and color depth

Sadly finding documentation, history and software for Innovion and its PGSIII Video processing computer is difficult

When that industry was near death Kodak released its Flashsync CCD4000 RGB color camera that was used to take “ride photos”
 
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