03-Toys_Galore.gmi (in Amiga)

2020-09-07

After my annus horribilis things weren't looking that great for Team Gemlog. I couldn't sell any more Amigas, because I couldn't they simply weren't being made any longer. Therefore, I couldn't get any new customers for my ERP and 3 years of hard work was down the sewer pipe. On the other hand, I did have several clients paying monthly already, which covered my mortgage and I'd also accumulated lots of toys with C< symbols on them :-)

My shack was about 15 minutes out of town. I had telephone and electricity. I had my own well for water. There was no natural gas. And no cable.. but this was long ago before small digital satellite dishes. What I had was a 'big dish' - a solid metal thing over a meter across. It had dual feed horns for C and Ku bands. I got it for free from a friend - it had belonged to a telco, but had, unfortunately, slid down a mountainside after a bit too much snow. It required a little "dent tuning" to function decently. "Dent tuning" means bashing it lovingly with a lump hammer in selected spots ;-) I bought a suitable receiver and my buddy gifted me with over 40 meters of dual RG6 + power for the motor, because I had too many trees blocking a decent shot - I wanted to 'see' more than one satellite -it needed to be at some distance from the house so it could pan back and forth through an arc of sky. I know this seems a bit remote from my stated goal of writing about Amigas, but 'remote' is the key here. I'm getting to it.

So there was a receiver to control the satellite dish, select satellites, move the dish, choose C/Ku band and change channels. It had a remote control. I also had quite a nice stereo audio receiver, which also had a remote control. And a multi-change cassette deck. Carousel CD player. VCR... Lots of remote controls...

Another thing I had was an unused joystick port on my A3000 (I still had the A2000 as well). I just don't play games. Ever. I may fire one up to see the graphics or listen to the sound or mess with the AI, but I don't play them seriously at all. Somewhere I saw where you could add plug in some IR LEDs to your joystick port, compile a bit of code and Boom! fully programmable infrared multi-remote! I went to the local TV repair shop (they still existed in the early 90's) and simply begged two or three IR LEDs from spare/dead/whatever remotes from the guy :-) I drilled a few holes in a bit of phenolic or something I had laying about, did some p2p wiring and had a powerfully bright IR transmitter/receiver. I put it on a camera tripod and pointed it in the general direction of all the 'stuff'. I fed all the remotes into the amiga one at a time. I had to type commands at it with a CLI, but it worked a treat! I was in geek heaven and supremely pleased with myself :-)

Obviously, the next step was a GUI. I know I wrote it in arexx, but I can't remember what I used for a gui toolkit at all. I have no idea. I can see the result in my head, but... :-(

Anyhow, even at this point some cool things are possible. I can use the CLI to do anything I want with all my multimedia stuff. I have an extremely powerful and flexible GUI and I can easily make more specialized ones. And I can schedule stuff! For example I made cronjob to move the dish to ANIK-C at midnight, choose the correct transponder and tell the VCR to record the BBC Breakfast News from London every night. Why not? Backhauls from NHK Tokyo, Deutsche Welle... anything! Record for so long, shut off, rewind the tape all ready for viewing. I could time shift FM radio - anything. Believe it or not, this sort of thing warms my little geek heart.

So. Why stop there just when I'm having fun? At some point I had bought a second hand genlock for $50, but didn't really have a use for it. If you didn't have an Amiga, you might not know that the standard crt monitor that came with them was the 1084. It had inputs for RGB from the computer as well as component NTSC/PAL video and audio. There was a slide switch you had to physically move to select the input. You can almost see the sweat from that exertion beading on my forehead can't you? So the obvious thing to do was to feed the full screen remote into the genlock and couple it with the analog NTSC video signal. I set the opacity of the computer image to a bit more than half - enough to easily read the buttons and see the mouse pointer and yet still see the live video underneath. I switched between full video and genlog output with a command hooked up to the middle mouse button. And the Gemlog saw that this was Good in His sight.

But lacking. For some reason (partly my fault) this house had 3 living rooms. 2@12'x25' on the main floor and 1@15x25' on the second floor. I had cabled rg6 everywhere like a normal person, but the amiga was only in the 'library' (so called, because it was full of bookshelves I purchased cheaply from our public library when they bought new ones...). Well. That sucks. I sure can't run mouse cable throughout the house. That would be silly! Or would it? It didn't have to be an actual cable... Solution: I bought an infrared mouse. You plug the receiver into the mouse port and the newly untethered mouse has line of sight and sends movements and clicks via infrared. Now what you need is to visit your friendly neighbourhood "Sight&Sound" for a 'remote extender'. This is a pair of RF 'walkie-talkies'. IR from a remote goes in one end, signal travels via RF to the other side of the pair which dutifully transmits the original codes via infrared. Perfecto.

Now you can have a battery powered infrared mouse in any room of the house. Add one side of a pair of IR walkie-talkies and now you can hit the middle mouse button on any video signal on the telly and control all the multimedia stuff in the library :-) How cool is that? Well... not quite cool enough. This is 1994 dammit! And I still don't have my flying car!

It happens that every year my little town, like all towns, has some kind of celebration once a year. Cabane à sucre days, seafest, regatta, w/e and my town has Riverboat Days. Parade, first nations dancers, salmon roasts, music in the park, bhangra dancers, fireworks, theatre... yeah. And helicopter rides. Expensive, but still cheaper than a normal flight ticket. Darn things are like $1,600/hr plus fuel. Anyhow, my kids and I kept missing the flights year after year. Well, one year I must have felt rich - I simply chartered one on my own. I think it was a 205. I paid for 2 hour tenths (pilot gave us 3!) and ponied up for the jet A after. I thought one of my kids might be scared, so I wanted to sit in the back with them. That left the copilot seat, so I took my friend's teen who was in air cadets along.

Scared? Pfft! Not for a second! They got those headsets on and commenced yakking. I shushed them to no avail. Fortunately the pilot had grandkids himself and was amused and not driven mad by their chatter. We buzzed our house, cruised up and down a large nearby lake... just bumbled around and had a great time. But I had a 'Cunning Plan' forming in my mind. Something worthy of Baldric and the Black Adder.

What would any Good Dad do at this point? That's right! He'd run out and buy a pair of voice activated walkie-talkies to play with, so I did. One of the little jobs I did at the time was to run an AB Dick 360 for two half days a week. I printed up a bunch of simple graphs, two up of the cartesian plane. One kid downstairs, one kid upstairs. I taught them to play 'battleship' by mouthing x,y coordinates into the walkie-talkies and, since they are sponges at that age, I also taught them the NATO alphabet - why not? The girl went on to teach it to her little classmate (3rd gr I think at this point) and they used it as their 'secret language' to spell things to one another. Did the ungrateful things thank me when they sailed through finite math later in life? Of course not! Still...

You know what would be cool? If the kids weren't around... one of the HT's could be strapped onto the amiga. And the other vox-activated HT could be on my waist. And, in theory, I could then tell all my multimedia stuff what to do! Voice recognition was in its infancy, but it did exist experimentally. Let us play (sounds very Catholic). I got something going quite easily really. "Louder", "Much Louder", "Mute", "Up", "Down" - I forget what all now. Worked great! Well. As long as I was sitting at the amiga. Otherwise: FAIL using the walki-talkies?! WT actual F? Aha! It needed the PTT noises at the beginning of the transmission and the squished sound! I re-recorded all the commands, but fed them in using the walkie-talkie with vox activation (I should have thought of that!) instead of a local microphone and it worked! :-)

Sadly, after all that effort (it took me a week to be able to 'talk' to my amiga), I only used the vox system for a couple of weeks. A teensy little problem crept in. Sometimes, seemingly randomly - at least, I never figured it out - the system would hear "Much louder" instead of what I'd actually said. And then it might mis-hear it again. Did I mention the killer stereo system I had back then? Yeah... So, at some point, the output from the stereo system would drown out the sound of any commands I tried to speak and I'd have to go and manually do something about it :-(

Oh well. Not every experiment works out. That's all. It was still fun getting there. The journey is often half the fun really.