Date   : Sat, 03 Dec 2005 03:27:39 -0000
From   : "Richard Gellman" <splodge@...>
Subject: Re: Domesday



> > Now the hard part: One Philips VP-415 LVROM Player.
> > This is actually a VP405, with a hack
>
> Quite some hack ;)
>

No kidding. You should see inside one. It literally is a VP405, with
bits
added. The days of wires being trailed between components "to make
things
work" suddenly come flooding back.

They even had to upgrade the power supply to accomodate the SCSI board,
as
the VP405s wasn't beefy enough, and even then the "new" PSU had bodges
fitted to increase reliability. This is why so many VP415s die easily,
they
are a *very* large hack ;)

Re: Trackerball, Marconi does ring a bell thereof. But I haven't seen
many
trackerball units floating around, so in the absence of one, a standard
AMX
mouse could be rigged to simulate one (probably a better idea too,
considering how we are mostly accustomed to mice now).

For those interested in a few nostalgic statistics, you may be
interested to
know, that the 12" laserdiscs had a 324Mb data capacity, shared with a
54,000 frame video capacity.

By shared, this means a data area and a video frame can not co-exist in
the
same physical place. This is why the "free space" map on the laser discs
shows numerous huge areas - these are the video sections. Likewise, the
blank gaps in the video sequence are the data areas.

The "B" side of the National Disc, is a LV-LP disc, which uses a
slightly
modified format to increase the video length to 1 hour (ish). This
format
can not be used to hold data.

-- Richard