[Coco] 8 slot multi pak

[Dave Philipsen]

Actually, that would be fun.  From time to time some of the characters 
have been sold on eBay.  Back in the 80s Chuck E. Cheese's went bankrupt 
and was bought out by Showbiz Pizza Place. They eventually transformed 
all of their characters into the CEC characters but there are some of 
the old SPP characters out there too.  All of the characters had 
pneumatic cylinders controlled by 24vdc valves for the movements so you 
might need a sizeable compressor depending on how many characters you 
wanted to run (the original SPP show named 'Rock-A-Fire Explosion' used 
a huge Ingersoll-Rand air compressor that ran on 208 3-phase.)

But if anyone (in the CoCo community) ever did decide to buy an old 
robot and wanted to get a small system set up I'd be glad to help you 
with it.  I wrote their animation programming system (a DOS program 
written in C) many years ago but it works well and CEC still uses it to 
this day.  Interestingly, their systems over the years used a 
data-on-tape method for playback on reel-to-reel tape decks that used 
biphase data which lends itself well to recording on analog media.  
Probably not that much different than the method used to save data with 
the CLOAD/CSAVE commands.  Most of their systems phased that out in 
favor of solid-state data storage but there are still about 100 
locations that still use the old method with audio being played back 
from one of the stereo tracks on a DVD player.

Interestingly, just yesterday, I finished a program (I still do 
consulting for them) that replaces the functionality of an antiquated PC 
they were using with a modified serial card used to generate the biphase 
data that was to be recorded to tape.  The program synthesizes the same 
data by generating it as PCM data in a wav file.  As you can imagine, 
being primarily a restaurant company, their technical expertise is not 
really on the cutting edge and has steadily declined over the years.  So 
they still have a lot of old technology that needs maintenance.


Dave


On 1/19/2017 9:59 AM, John W. Linville wrote:
> Hahaha...now I need to figure-out how to buy and old set of those animatronics!
>
> John
>
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 08:47:45AM -0600, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>> Yes.
>>
>>
>> On 1/19/2017 8:21 AM, John W. Linville wrote:
>>> Did you work for Chuck-E-Cheese???
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 01:32:28AM -0600, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>>>> Yes, that's possible.  I have some old passive backplanes that were used for
>>>> an animatronics system that used a 6502 processor at 1 MHz as the main board
>>>> and the CPU card with just a single set of buffers would run 8 or 9 other
>>>> cards on the backplane.  The backplane fit into a 19" rack and I don't
>>>> believe there was any kind of termination on the end.  Literally hundreds of
>>>> these card cages were made and used about 12 hours a day, 365 days a year
>>>> and some are still running today (since 1977) and have had no problems in
>>>> that regard.  Some expansion cards had 6821s, some had 6850s, that sort of
>>>> thing.  The backplane PCB was double thickness - .125".
>>>>
>>>> Dave
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 1/18/2017 1:18 AM, RETRO Innovations wrote:
>>>>> On 1/18/2017 12:44 AM, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>>>>>> I think you could probably drive 8 slots with a single set of
>>>>>> buffers.  Just make sure the buffers have a high fanout.  I think
>>>>>> some buffers can do 20 or more TTL loads on fanout.  And you might
>>>>>> also want to experiment with termination on the end of the lines.
>>>>> I meant to also note that the capacitance might be an issue, but forgot
>>>>> to add that before sending.  TI and S-100 bus machine shave 8-12 slots,
>>>>> but most include buffers on each card to deal with the issue.
>>>>>
>>>>> Jim
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>
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