Games & Cassettes! on the 1975 Sphere computer
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- Опубліковано 15 тра 2023
- Demonstrating original and vintage games, with cassette data storage, on the modular Sphere computer from 1975. In this video we see how the "Serial Interface Module" (SIM) is connected up to talk to a tape cassette deck, and we look at how to load and run some classic games like users did in the 1970s.
This is the second in a series; if you haven't seen the introduction to the Sphere itself, it's here:
• Demonstration of a Sph...
Watch my presentation at the Computer History Museum in 2022 about the history of Sphere computers, the company, and the community:
• Sphere 1: The First Mo...
Info on Sphere and this project, including documents, images and software information.
sphere.computer
(Sign up there for email updates on the book, etc!)
Shooting Stars game in Byte magazine:
archive.org/details/byte-maga...
Teaser in PCC:
archive.org/details/1974-09-p...
Conway's Game of Life info:
conwaylife.com
Sphere web emulator:
sphere.computer/emulator
Copyright (c) 2023 Ben Zotto.
Music (c) (p) Arcal Productions, used with permission.
I was relieved to see the wood paneling matched the era of computing.
Ha, I didn't notice that! Wait... does that mean that I'm OLD and just thought it was normal??
Ok, so that inspired me to see if there was an online life generator, which captivated me for an astounding length of time. In fact it gave me a great idea for a new variation.
“Life” is so cool! Glad you found a rewarding rabbit hole
Another great video. Thanks for bringing this system to the spotlight.
I like that it controlled the remote socket!
Not surprised to see the Game of Life. It’s pretty interesting how your keysmash resulted in a few copies of one of the stable structures.
Nice BGM too, definitely fits the tone and mood really well. Good job on the integration with your site and other videos as well!
Thanks Kaitlyn for the kind words, the "artistic choices" such as they are are all intentional and I'm glad it landed for you. But spoiler movie magic: I filmed one or two other keysmashes before I got a really good one ;)
@@bzotto I had an inkling it might not have been the first attempt ;)
Excellent video and work! Thanks for sharing
…. Nice walk down memory lane :-) I still have a KIM computer from those days, if anybody is interested.
Very cozy video, thanks a lot!
I like that description! Thanks.
Great informative video series on this rather obscure computer. Given its relatively advanced design (all in one and memory mapped display), I wonder why it did not become more popular... I don't think it came cheap though, so that might have been an issue for hobbyists. Regardless, I would have loved to have one back in the day was it not for the minor issue of my age (10 years old) :)
Thanks! Glad you are enjoying. Lots of reasons it didn't become popular-- price was one consideration although when you do an apples-to-apples comparison it was comparable to an e.g. Altair system and terminal or etc. Spheres had a reputation for slow shipment turnaround and unreliability, and the documentation left something to be desired, so they ended up being most useful to people with the patience and chops to build and debug them over time, which was not true of all hobbyists. They also chose the 6800 and a unique bus structure, meaning there wasn't much crossover from other platforms in software or peripherals. (That wasn't really their fault though, they could not have known that the Altair's processor and bus would become a defacto standard.)
Would I be correct in thinking that this was essentially just an American home computer? I love how advanced it is, especially for its age, it's a year older than me! Sadly though, never heard of this before seeing these videos in England ... Would have been utterly amazing its day; a real game changer!
I can imagine Lee Felsenstein practically druelling over this as a base for his community memory Tom Swift terminal!
Thanks again for sharing!
It was almost unheard of in the US as well- Sphere was somewhat
marginal in their heyday and totally obscure since. And I would not describe it as a home computer in the sense that showed up a few years later- Spheres were owned almost exclusively by electronics hobbyists and small businesses hoping to make them into useful business tools. Same was true of the altair, swtpc, IMSAI, etc
@@bzotto That's a real shame ... Who knows how far they could have gone ... Amazes me how much good hardware got passed over for the Lord only knows why! I mean this and the Sharp 68000, Acorn Archimedes and the Enterprise 128 for example ... Makes me sad to think what might have been!
Thanks for the heads up though, appreciate it!
Maybe it's just may but sometimes I daydream that I could go back in time and take one computer with me ... oh and I'd specifically go back to Bletchley Park during the early days and show them even a 386 with an 80387 attached 😀
wow
Out of curiosity, are the white streaky video artifacts a result of poor buffering between the CPU and video output circuitry accessing screen RAM at the same time? For example, the CPU is trying to write to a certain memory address while the video output circuitry is trying to read from it at the same time.
Pretty much, yes. And it’s not necessarily the same address- it’s more that there’s no control at all to switch between CPU access and the video output circuit, so what happens is stuff gets written somewhere in video memory but its remnants on the bus at that moment end up in the video dot shift registers and get displayed for a frame
Gotta say,. your Snake port seems butter smooth Ben, nice job!
Is there source available perhaps? Or am I just being blind!
Thanks Ben for a great series of videos - looking forward to the next ones. I'm fascinated by this computer, but since I was 7 years old at the time this came out, and didn't touch my first computer till 4 years later (a Commodore PET at school in late 1979) I didn't have the pleasure of owning one. Living in the UK, it probably wouldn't have happened anyway. Do you know if any were exported to other countries outside of the USA ? Would be interesting to know if any such units found their way to this side of the pond.
A handful of systems (more than 10 but perhaps not more than 20-30?) ended up in various locales outside the US-- Canada, Hong Kong, and Australia in particular, the latter because there was a distributor in Sydney. I don't have any specific knowledge of users in the UK. That doesn't mean there weren't any, but it would have been pretty lonely. Thank you for the kind words!
Probably want to turn the lights off when recording the CRT.
setting the level to about 5 should work and I would try 300 baud which is slow but should work
4:11 The period-correct Dymo label on the period-correct generic cassette is awesome! Are these cassettes' with Dymo labels actually FROM the 70s, or did you re-create them with glorious accuracy in modern day?
:) They are intentional modern recreations from new-old-stock tapes and an old Dymo. I have seen old Sphere tapes as part of my research and a lot of them looked more or less like that, so I wanted to create an accurate impression. I appreciate your attention to detail!
So how did anyone use it at the time if it didn't have any way to save/load programs? There must have been some hardware solution out there even if it wasn't a first party one. -- Did they just use it as a remote terminal with a printer?
You mean before the SIM/1 board came along at the start of '76? It sounds absurd but people would have to re-enter their programs at system startup. The more technically sophisticated users could (and some did) cook up their own one-off serial interfaces by connecting via the system bus plugs-- that would have allowed a connection to teletype or similar hardware with paper tape punch etc. (Some versions of the Sphere CPU board had serial-capable hardware built in, and that was operable a couple months before the SIM/1 board was available.) There was no third party hardware as such available commercially. This sounds bananas of course, but by comparison the first several months of the Altair's existence was similar -- just lights and switches -- before their own serial board became available around summer/fall of '75. There was such massive pent up demand for microcomputers that people were, if not happy about, at least accepting of the massive limitations they suffered as they rolled out-- the idea of building and actually conveniently using nontrivial pieces of software was not the immediate need.
How is the pc case like? I imagine a minimalistic sphere case.
Nothing so cool! It was a sheet metal chassis with built in keyboard and screen, looked a lot like a 70s-era terminal.
I'm just really skeptical this computer thingamabobber has any practical applications.
Honestly this one had a hard time with practical applications! There were a few documented productive uses, though.
So if you need a prog you write it by yourself