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I had one of these as a kid; the slow way it drew the graphics onto the screen [1] for a new activity was an aesthetic in itself, like a coloring book being drawn and colored in before your eyes, a perfect loading screen for kids.
Wikipedia notes: The system will "draw" images by filling in areas of the screen with color one line at a time; it is not known whether this is an effect employed for the student's enjoyment or if it is due to the slow processing time of the system.
That does look cool, I'm assuming they stored a lot of the graphics as a series of drawing and flood fill commands as a way to save ROM space, similar to how the old Sierra DOS adventure games did their graphics.
That’s cool.
Similar to how Pixar made their first movie about toys because CG made everything look plasticky back then and they realized they couldn’t get away with making a movie with humans or animals on screen for the whole movie.
The best creative people lean into the limitations of technology.
Probably due to the slow processing speed. That thing had like a rinky-dink Z80 and the most basic of graphics chips[0]. It probably couldn't do much besides a simple frame buffer, so you saw the CPU draw the entire screen, laying down the outline vectors and then flood-filling enclosed areas with color. There is something comfortingly "80s graphics" about watching this unfold in front of your eyes, similar to watching an old CAD drawing regen, or the effect in videos like Advanced Video Group's "Bearobics": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWMNsuIeY0Y
That said, I find it grating when I watch programs like Microsoft Teams draw themselves visibly, like old Windows 1.0 programs.
[0] The graphics logic is entirely custom, implemented in a Toshiba gate array, and it isn't something well-known like a TMS9918A or something else based on that design.
Seems quite advanced for a '88 educational toy. For comparison, I got a VTech SmartStart for xmas in the early '90s and it had just a short 14-segment display line and could mainly be used together with accompanying paper books :-)
I had a look at some VTech computers at the local Toysrus (or something like that) recently, and amazingly they don't look much more advanced now than what they offered in the mid 1990s. That's pretty hard to pull off, but I think today it's a deliberate choice.
Does anyone know if a list exists with various models of these Vtech machines, and what hardware is in there?
I come across Vtechs semi-regularly in places like thrift stores & flea markets. And wouldn't mind having a go at some.
The model discussed here seems fairly hacking/modding friendly (discrete Z80, cartridge port etc). But I suspect most Vtechs are dirt-cheap, undocumented ASICs + tiny LCD screens. No fun hacking that (besides ~0 collectors value).
This thing was slow as balls, but as a kid I didn't really know any better... I could be wrong, but I really feel like edutainment really fell away once everyone could get a real computer with an internet connection.
Holy shit, blast from the past! My dad had got one of this and when I was born my family had already moved back to India. I booted this up when I was about 10 years old and I was so mesmerized. It was impossible to afford any game consoles for my family so this took a lot of my time. I was so impressed with how everything fit together, the robot was cute… I loved it.
My dad also had got a Tatung Einstein which never worked. Last time I went back to India (I moved to the US for higher ed) I opened it up and was excited to see that they are a bunch of chips that they taught me in Comp 101 (they were basic TTL flip flops). I brought it back with me.
I still have it, and one day I hope to have enough time and space to open it up and translate it into an FPGA as a way to brush up on my basic digital signal knowledge.
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Why is the copper routing so funky? Were the PCBs drawn by hand?
That is correct.
Crafted by Rajat
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