CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[Fred Garvin]

Hi all:

The item below ended on eBay earlier today:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370424682425

I threw out an early bid that was way too low and didn't win; did anyone here get this? I hope it found a good home; if so I'd be very curious as to what it does and how it works. Obviously one part goes into the expansion connector and the other into the main cart slot and the RCA connector would go to the Dimensia system control connector. Hopefully everything needed is there and there's no additional diskette based software needed.

I can't recall C64s widely used for in-store demos, so was this a prototype of a consumer computer to Dimensia interface? Interesting...

Thanks!

[ae.tc]

not likely to see one of these again


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[Fred Garvin]

Yeah; I didn't bid higher for a number of reasons. I never owned a C-64, and if I was to assemble an '80s retro computer rig it would be my old Atari 800 (which sounds fun now that I think of it). Although I did own a full Dimensia system back in the day, it's long gone and I cannot see ever putting one together again (particularly the monitor). Last but not least I didn't want to unnecessarily drive up the price for someone who might actually get to try this thing out; anyone seriously jonesing for Dimensia probably has an eBay search agent set up (as I do although I'm mainly looking for advertising and promotional items these days) and would spot this pretty easily. I just hope someone with a fully-functional Dimensia rack (Tom?) got this and can maybe post their experiences with it for the curious.

[cedmagic]

I didn't bid on this (away from Internet and cell phone access at the time), but it would be interesting to hook it up with a C64 and the Dimensia control bus to see what functionality is provided. RCA did plan computer interfaces for the 400-series CED players and the software was written for various computers of the time including the C64, VIC20, Apple II, Atari 800, IBM PC, and Timex Sinclair. If the code on the carts HC8531 refers to the year 1985, they wouldn't provide any CED functionality as that was sometime after the cancellation of the CED system and the removal of any references to it in Dimensia.

The programming in these carts may be stored on EPROMS, in which case they could probably be duplicated by examining the interface and making a copy of the chips.

--Tom Howe