Karaoke Forums

Jukeboxes dart boards and pinball machines use a eprom which is an erasable programmable read only memory chip. It contains the basic progam to run the machine.  There can be different chips to handle operations or it can be a lsi (large scale integration )with all inside one chip. Lsi is harder to update and maintain..

As each Windows OS progresses it becomes less efficient takes more memory and a bigger power supply.. 500 watts of power for a home computer?   The dart board takes about 5-10 watts...The home computer is subject to viruses depends on thousands of sub routines for simple operations and as software or hardware is added becomes less and less efficient....

I would like to see a karaoke machine with a few rom's in it dedicated to the basic operations only.. video audio and one with hosting capabilities.. In mass production they would cost pennies apiece. A 12 volt car battery could do shows for a year...  And using bubble memory it would be about as big as a cd drive..... Updates would be simple as plugging in a new rom....

_________________
Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

Hey Ollie, I can't remember if bubble memory is volatile storage or not.

When I was about 11, I had an idea for something that is commonly used today but my dad said it was impossible and wouldn't help me work on it. Too bad, we would be rich today. I didn't know the name for it at the time. We don't use it in that form either but this was long before CDs even. My idea was compressed music files written to chips that could be easily inserted into a player.

I havnt messed with eproms for years and dont know the memory capabilities But it can be done now just like ipods where the music can be burned into a rom I can see the days when manus will sell music packages in a little plugin chip. They will be plugged into a "bus" and be accessed by an address...

_________________
Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

at a consumer electronics show, a few years before the CD-ROM came out, I played around with a circuit board you could insert your own eproms into it. In one station, they had the LP player, hooked up to their eprom burner. You recorded essentially what are SORT of like the mp3s... they compressed, but not near the compression that's the standard now. Anyway, you then took the eprom and inserted it into the board. Literally turned off their "player", pulled out their board, and it had spaces for ten eproms... was in essence a jukebox.

Even had a car demo of the same thing.

I saw the dangers right away. People pressing them in wrong, etc.

Changing out an eprom always makes me nervous. They could have been designed with Chuck-proof technology. That would make the errors in instalation minimal.

the good thing about such an idea is it's a stand alone machine. To "nintendo" it would solve many, MANY problems.

But what do you do when the technology changes completely? Go "nintendo 64"??

Granted, we DO either build or buy newer machines... but I much prefer the technology of installing ourselves.

Yes, with higher-end performance, you're going to need larger power supplies.

now, you CAN dummy down a system, and if you know enough about the operating systems, you can delete and uninstall sections. There's even some help pages I've seen on the net (Tig showed me a few, a friend of mine Doug showed me even more) where you can literally only keep what you need to run in a base-mode.

This is what the media center software was supposed to be... a super stripped down version of XP, with JUST what you needed for well, MEDIA playing! !

I need to look into that. Thanks.

The first computer (other than a VIC 20) that I had was an Atari ST.  I liked it because it had built in MIDI ports.  It had 520K of memory expandable to 1040K.  You had to install something like 10 chips extra to get to 1040K. To do that cost more than adding an extra 256Meg does today. Believe it or not, you could actually do some pretty cool things with that small amount of memory.  The OS updates were all made by changing PROMS.  None of the OS was in software form.

I don't know about the rest of the folks, but to me this is like rocket science, guys!  I am good at changing batteries though--the apex of my electronic abilties...

In an ideal world of electronics, from a technical standpoint that's about all you'd need to know how to do!

I agree. COmputers are supposed to work for us, not us for them.

I remember my old VIC 20. I wrote a program for practicing lyrics on it. Much like karaoke.

My first comp


I had to hack it to get 64kb ram.......

_________________
Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

My Vic20 had an optional expansion ram of 64K. Most of us can't even count that LOW when it comes to memory. Optional means I didn't have it.

The first computer I ever used was an Apple 2E at school. Our school had three of them. Basic was the first computer language I worked with and I really liked it. It inspired me to put a flowchart on my bedroom door incase my sister felt like invading my privacy. It told her what to do in case she even wanted to know.

I liked defining other peple's priorities.

Trace On         CLS Gosub 1034   I/O Error

_________________
Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

Ah! Flashbacks.

 I like the roaring CPU speed of just over 1 MHz that the Radio Shack comp had!

Yes, Basic was a good... well basic language.  I remember writing a program that would catalog and print out my LP record collection. Pascal was good too. Sheesh, anybody remember Fortran (engineers used that one I think) and Cobal? There's a couple of antiques for you!

Fortran I have a chance at understanding. Cobol has too many English based acronyms mixed in from what I hear. I could never understand COBOL.

The first real basic progam I wrote was a darkened picture of a hill with a barn roof showing.  A whirring atarted getting louder and the pic brightened a little.. A space ship came over (it looked like a cheese burger) and fired lasers at the barn then disappeared..  Then I got a chess pack with rom and a Pacman..

 Back in those days lets go over to ollie's and drink beer and watch his cheese burger kill a barn.......

_________________
Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

We did similar stuff. I remember being so caught-up in programming that I could go hours without even thinking of having a cig.

EPROM? Man you are an old school. No one uses EPROM anymore. It's way too slow and it's expensive. Everything now days use FLASH for non volatile storage. It's much cheaper and has much higher cycle rate, in the order of 100x or so.

For something like what you proposed, you are probably better off with either DSP or XILINX. It's programmable and with FLASH to keep the code it's easy to produce. Only thing is it will not be cheap.

_________________

Seize the day and SING!!!