Well yes, I write better than I speak, but the exclamation mark was to indicate that I would dream in a foreign language. Maybe if I lived in an English speaking country, it wouldn't be much of a surprise.
Of course, all the imagined VIC-20 cartridges I've dreamed about had English labels/names, but that is part of the plan. Although a number of game titles were translated into Swedish, very few native software companies issued their own games only with Swedish titles.
New VIC dreams
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saundby
- Vic 20 Enthusiast
- Posts: 166
- Joined: Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:55 pm
- Website: http://saundby.com/
- Location: Gold Country, CA
Another Vic-related dream from about 1982. I had been working a lot of odd hours for my employer at the time as well as burying myself in my hobbies during the few off-hours I enjoyed. One of my problems at the time was the cost of RAM. I'd priced some chips for expanding my Vic past the Super Expander, and was pretty disgusted with what I found. I could have bought them in a moment, since my employer was paying me plenty well for all the hours I was working, but my pride wouldn't let me buy the chips. Now on to the dream...
I was working on making some chain mail one evening, while my room mate was complaining about the lack of memory on the Vic while he was trying to finish a program. I commented on how I may be able to turn up some core memory and interface it for a reasonable price, when suddenly I looked at the chainmail rings in my hands. I realized I could whip up some mag amps out of the chainmail rings and some other components I already had on hand. Fortunately, in the dream version I only needed one amp per row of rings, rather than one per ring. I used about a one foot wide by six inch long piece of chainmail with quarter inch rings, wired it up to a pigtail that ran into the Vic through the expansion port hole and Voila!, the Vic reported another 2K available to BASIC. I got to work with pliers and ran off about another square foot of chainmail. This time it got tedious to run magnet wire to all the little rings, but I finally finished it, and got about 17K of additional RAM reported in BASIC.
I decided I could put the memory inside the Vic, so I opened it up and slid it into the case under the keyboard (the circuit board was attached to the underside of the keyboard in the dream.) I put a couple of sheets of typing paper on top of the chainmail to keep it from shorting out the board. It was a challenge to close the case, but eventually I managed to get it by shaking the case back and forth to get the mail to settle into the case bottom low enough to let me get the top back on and the screws in.
Unfortunately, when I closed the case up the Vic refused to come up, it just gave a white screen. When I opened the case back up again, I had to get out the pliers and open up rings to separate the chainmail to get at the circuit board, which was now _under_ the mail. Finally I opened up a slit in the mail and got the circuit board out.
At this point the dream went in a different direction, with me walking around San Francisco looking for a BART station so that I could get to work to put an o-scope on the board. Whenever I got to where I thought the station entrance was, I'd find that I still had a way to go. And at some point in the dream the board and chainmail memory were forgotten.
-Mark G.
I was working on making some chain mail one evening, while my room mate was complaining about the lack of memory on the Vic while he was trying to finish a program. I commented on how I may be able to turn up some core memory and interface it for a reasonable price, when suddenly I looked at the chainmail rings in my hands. I realized I could whip up some mag amps out of the chainmail rings and some other components I already had on hand. Fortunately, in the dream version I only needed one amp per row of rings, rather than one per ring. I used about a one foot wide by six inch long piece of chainmail with quarter inch rings, wired it up to a pigtail that ran into the Vic through the expansion port hole and Voila!, the Vic reported another 2K available to BASIC. I got to work with pliers and ran off about another square foot of chainmail. This time it got tedious to run magnet wire to all the little rings, but I finally finished it, and got about 17K of additional RAM reported in BASIC.
I decided I could put the memory inside the Vic, so I opened it up and slid it into the case under the keyboard (the circuit board was attached to the underside of the keyboard in the dream.) I put a couple of sheets of typing paper on top of the chainmail to keep it from shorting out the board. It was a challenge to close the case, but eventually I managed to get it by shaking the case back and forth to get the mail to settle into the case bottom low enough to let me get the top back on and the screws in.
Unfortunately, when I closed the case up the Vic refused to come up, it just gave a white screen. When I opened the case back up again, I had to get out the pliers and open up rings to separate the chainmail to get at the circuit board, which was now _under_ the mail. Finally I opened up a slit in the mail and got the circuit board out.
At this point the dream went in a different direction, with me walking around San Francisco looking for a BART station so that I could get to work to put an o-scope on the board. Whenever I got to where I thought the station entrance was, I'd find that I still had a way to go. And at some point in the dream the board and chainmail memory were forgotten.
-Mark G.
Haha. It appears you had the by far most unusual VIC dreams of us all, both the previous one about the VIC robot and this about the chainmail memory expansion. Maybe you're extremely crafty with reusing stuff, a real life MacGyver or Scrapheap hero? Heck, I doubt even MacGyver could come up with converting a chainmail to a RAM chip if his life depended on it.
Anders Carlsson
I had one last night.
I went into Cash Converters, and found two Datasette drives. One was a C2N 1530; the other, some 3rd party Datasette drive; I think it was made by Panasonic. I knew it was a Datasette because of the cable connection. There was an old price tag on the box of the C2N of $58; the price tag on the other one was $4.75. Thinking there was a mistake, I asked what the price of the C2N was and was told it was as marked, so obviously I bought the $4.75 3rd party tape drive. After I secured my purchase, I told them how stupid they were since the C2N's are very common, but I'd never seen a 3rd party Datasette drive ever which would make that drive rare and more valuable to collectors. Then I woke up to go to the can.
I went into Cash Converters, and found two Datasette drives. One was a C2N 1530; the other, some 3rd party Datasette drive; I think it was made by Panasonic. I knew it was a Datasette because of the cable connection. There was an old price tag on the box of the C2N of $58; the price tag on the other one was $4.75. Thinking there was a mistake, I asked what the price of the C2N was and was told it was as marked, so obviously I bought the $4.75 3rd party tape drive. After I secured my purchase, I told them how stupid they were since the C2N's are very common, but I'd never seen a 3rd party Datasette drive ever which would make that drive rare and more valuable to collectors. Then I woke up to go to the can.
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saundby
- Vic 20 Enthusiast
- Posts: 166
- Joined: Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:55 pm
- Website: http://saundby.com/
- Location: Gold Country, CA
Hehe.carlsson wrote:Haha. It appears you had the by far most unusual VIC dreams of us all, both the previous one about the VIC robot and this about the chainmail memory expansion. Maybe you're extremely crafty with reusing stuff, a real life MacGyver or Scrapheap hero? Heck, I doubt even MacGyver could come up with converting a chainmail to a RAM chip if his life depended on it.
I got started in electronics when I was a kid because I couldn't afford model railroading. For that you had to buy stuff, but for electronics you could always turn up an old radio out of somebody's trash, then raid it for parts. When I was riding my bike I was always surprised at how many parts I could pick up at the roadside, I guess there are a sizable number of people who dispose of old stereos by throwing them out of the car window.
About half the parts I use are salvaged, and I have as much space in my home dedicated to testing and reconditioning parts as I do to building new equipment.
And, yes, I've used pencil leads as resistors, made my own thermocouple junctions out of different types of wire (ice points made out of old thermoses and ice from the freezer), I've wound my own transformers with recovered magnet wire and just about any type of core you can think of from toilet paper rolls to nails--and occasionally even a ferrite--and just the day before yesterday I was pulling a solar panel out of a calculator I got out of a trash can that had been thrown away because crayons had melted into the keypad. It'll be powering a little circuit I'm building with an AVR uC, and I'm still trying to decide if I can use the LCD in something.
Back when I was working a lot of long and odd hours I used to get odd technical dreams. One of my off-hours hobbies was the Vic, so it appeared in the dreams (making medieval armor was another of my hobbies.) If I pull a long haul on a project now, it still happens. The other night I was rewiring a piece of fabric with LEDs worked into it so that I could stretch it over a frame and use it as a bitmapped display (in a dream--in real life I had been trying to troubleshoot a circuit laid on a glass substrate.)
-Mark
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saundby
- Vic 20 Enthusiast
- Posts: 166
- Joined: Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:55 pm
- Website: http://saundby.com/
- Location: Gold Country, CA
Most recent dream:
I went to our family's summer cottage, and found a bunch of VIC's and C64's stored away. Most of them didn't boot up, so I begun shifting around chips and swapping power supplies until the point when all of them were fully working. There even were small colour TVs enough to run them all, and some tape software that I loaded.
One VIC game that I loaded, was some kind of Splatform rip-off. You have a small, bouncing ball and move through one static (not scrolling) screen at a time, filled with platforms and spikes. You need to complete the course in a certain order, perhaps pick up something on the platforms, and then jump off the screen from the leftmost platform. The higher platform you finish from, the more bonus points you get. You can be at least four-six players, taking turns.
However, here comes the twist that makes this relatively good game concept sound weird and out of a dream. When you have reached a certain amount of points, e.g. 3000, the game will decrease everyone else's scores relatively to yours. An example:
Player 1: 2100 pts. P2: 1700 pts. P3: 2300 pts. P4: 900 pts.
Now player 1 finishes a course and gains 1000 bonus points. He has more than 3000 pts, so the game reduces his score to 500 pts. Everyone else will have their score reduced simultaneously:
Player 1: 500 pts
Player 2: 1700/3100 * 500 = 274 pts
Player 3: 2300/3100 * 500 = 371 pts
Player 4: 900/3100 * 500 = 145 pts
It was like one should never exceed a certain amount of points; never become too superior vs the other participants.
I went to our family's summer cottage, and found a bunch of VIC's and C64's stored away. Most of them didn't boot up, so I begun shifting around chips and swapping power supplies until the point when all of them were fully working. There even were small colour TVs enough to run them all, and some tape software that I loaded.
One VIC game that I loaded, was some kind of Splatform rip-off. You have a small, bouncing ball and move through one static (not scrolling) screen at a time, filled with platforms and spikes. You need to complete the course in a certain order, perhaps pick up something on the platforms, and then jump off the screen from the leftmost platform. The higher platform you finish from, the more bonus points you get. You can be at least four-six players, taking turns.
However, here comes the twist that makes this relatively good game concept sound weird and out of a dream. When you have reached a certain amount of points, e.g. 3000, the game will decrease everyone else's scores relatively to yours. An example:
Player 1: 2100 pts. P2: 1700 pts. P3: 2300 pts. P4: 900 pts.
Now player 1 finishes a course and gains 1000 bonus points. He has more than 3000 pts, so the game reduces his score to 500 pts. Everyone else will have their score reduced simultaneously:
Player 1: 500 pts
Player 2: 1700/3100 * 500 = 274 pts
Player 3: 2300/3100 * 500 = 371 pts
Player 4: 900/3100 * 500 = 145 pts
It was like one should never exceed a certain amount of points; never become too superior vs the other participants.
Anders Carlsson
This must be a spreading disease.. do you dream in Commodore?
I dreamt a few nights ago that I had found in a thrift shop an early working prototype of a VIC 64, it had the same keyboard as a VIC but with extra function keys alongside the power light. It also ran the full library of VIC20 as well as C64 software.
For some reason the thrift shop was on an island, and when I tried to board my plane to leave the island, they told me I'd have to leave the machine behind.
Naturally, as one would do, I put my amazing find in a plastic bag and decided to swim off the island instead. (Note, in real life I think I am the only Australian who can't swim). There was also no sight of land, but I fiugured it was worth the risk.
But, you'd all do that, wouldn't you?
-G
I dreamt a few nights ago that I had found in a thrift shop an early working prototype of a VIC 64, it had the same keyboard as a VIC but with extra function keys alongside the power light. It also ran the full library of VIC20 as well as C64 software.
For some reason the thrift shop was on an island, and when I tried to board my plane to leave the island, they told me I'd have to leave the machine behind.
Naturally, as one would do, I put my amazing find in a plastic bag and decided to swim off the island instead. (Note, in real life I think I am the only Australian who can't swim). There was also no sight of land, but I fiugured it was worth the risk.
But, you'd all do that, wouldn't you?
-G
3^4 is 81.0000001
I have never had a VIC dream, but for a while I was having dreams that I would go into a thrift store and find a lot of really interesting and unknown Coleco mini arcade electronic games (like the ones they sold in the early 1980s). Or in some cases it would be strange and new Atari cartridges I didn't have. In almost all of the cases, I'd end up grabbing a few, then another collector would come by and start nosing around. Then I'd see some more and would try to get those too. Then the pile in my arms would get too big and they'd all start falling all over the floor, and I'd be losing them...etc.
Interesting! Almost like I'm putting myself in one of those Aesop's Fables about being too greedy.
Interesting! Almost like I'm putting myself in one of those Aesop's Fables about being too greedy.
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saundby
- Vic 20 Enthusiast
- Posts: 166
- Joined: Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:55 pm
- Website: http://saundby.com/
- Location: Gold Country, CA
Or something like it. How about this?Victragic wrote:This must be a spreading disease.. do you dream in Commodore?
I dreamt a few nights ago that I had found in a thrift shop an early working prototype of a VIC 64, it had the same keyboard as a VIC but with extra function keys alongside the power light. It also ran the full library of VIC20 as well as C64 software.
For some reason the thrift shop was on an island, and when I tried to board my plane to leave the island, they told me I'd have to leave the machine behind.
Naturally, as one would do, I put my amazing find in a plastic bag and decided to swim off the island instead. (Note, in real life I think I am the only Australian who can't swim). There was also no sight of land, but I fiugured it was worth the risk.
But, you'd all do that, wouldn't you?
-G
Get a lead-acid battery, hook it up to the Vic-64. Hook the audio output to the amp in a transistor radio. Program the machine to make barking or meowing noises, cover it with a piece of fake fur (or something that looks enough like it at a glance--shredded pampas grass, cocoanut shell, whatever.) Shove the lot into a pet carrier and check it as an "assistance animal." Tell them your olfactory nerve is shot so you carry a "smelling-nose cat" for safety reasons.
Yeah, OK.
But it beats trying to swim, right? And who knows, it may just be crazy enough to work. I know if a Vic-64 turns up in my dream and I run into similar problems I'll give it a try. If it works I'll let you know.
8P
-Mark
(Yes, I've been up too long today.)