Seeing Barbie in a chair at a computer is the most relatable a Barbie has ever looked and now I can’t stop picturing her at a 9-5 desk job. Edit to add: As someone who was (and still very much is) completely enamored with Barbie Horseback Riding for PC, I am incredibly thrilled that that was the activity you went with out of so many (very cool, as to be expected) options.
Having worked in the toy industry previously... The syllable-based mouth movements may or may not actually be syllable-based. You'd be surprised what you can do with a bit of hysteresis and level thresholds on a PCM stream. But the toy industry also has a lot of audio file formats that let you embed "events" in the audio stream, so you can trigger things like this mouth movement at the appropriate time. A lot of toys that have light shows synced to audio will use this, too, 'cus it makes it /much/ easier to synchronize things when the audio file itself contains the cues. Surprisingly, this is actually a functionality available in WAV files, with CUE markers, though usually they'll get re-encoded down to a much easier to parse format for microcontrollers.
Looking closer at the mouth during the "how many phrases will we get" sequence, I'm pretty sure it's threshold based, not syllable-based. Phrase #3 ("I love to see the flowers by a mountain trail"), it triggers on "I" and "Love", but then misses "to see" entirely and that "t" sounds like it got mangled by the audio compression making it quieter.
I dug through the ISO on the internet archive a bit, and I found the files that contain all the name audio data. I recognize the file format, 'cus it's an ancient ancestor of the files I worked with. If you can figure out the encoder settings, it probably wouldn't be hard to add more names to the list. Also, there are no events embedded in the audio files. The pointer that would lead to the event table is empty, which is how they indicate that there are no events.
Unfortunately it looks like this particular audio format's been removed from the "current" version of the encoder software, and I can't find a version old enough to support it.
I hope he sees this. A few more details on the name of the format might be useful? I'm quite curious what the encoding is myself. Could you see what variety of CIR it uses?
Regarding the custom file format, you could maybe check to see if the ones included in the CD have a similar structure to what you would expect the .bcn format would have? Failing someone sending you an actual .bcn file it might be a great start point to reverse engineer this thing.
I’ve been aware of it for years and I’ve always wanted to cover it! I have never run across one in my normal travels though, not complete anyway. Shelby did a great job preserving the experience though 👍
A few years ago, I was in the audience for a panel with Jim Cummings, the voice actor. Someone asked him about recording the voice lines for a customizable talking Pooh doll. Apparently it was ARDUOUS, with hours upon hours of reading off names and awkwardly cut-off sentences. He said even he started catching himself doing the Pooh voice at drive-thrus and answering the phone. He had already been the primary VO for Pooh for over a decade at that point, so you'd think he would have been used to it. But there was just so much material to get through... I pity the poor VA who had to record all these Barbie lines, then go back and record the custom requests for who knows how long afterward Maybe the tinny little speaker and low bitrate made soundalikes less obvious.
This era of Barbie was voiced by Chris Anthony Lansdowne, a really talented woman. She has recounted getting hired by Mattel in interviews before, and she said that she was reading names every single day, all day, for months. It was the first thing she did for the company. She jokes about going a little insane during the process. The Detective Barbie game, released a couple of years later, also has over 50K names, I am assuming most of which were used from this product.
16:53 - The patent expired in 2015, deal now is everything loads so fast no one got to make any genuine use of that. 22:58 - I wouldn't be surprised if the mouth movement was just controlled by making the barbie voice on one channel with a mono speaker and the other channel having the control data.
I just noticed how the doll initially only said "Hi, let's get to the computer and play". Presumably a factory setting to nudge new owners into setting up the computer connection and not just keep it in the default mode.
I got super excited when Codsworth from Fallout 4 said my name, and I'm a grown adult. I couldn't imagine how I'd feel if my parents did what Shelby mentioned at the end. You've got a good heart, Shelby.
Pausing at 1:53 to say that the Lego Mindstorms RCX doesn't actually use IRDA, it just modulates a 38KHz carrier with the 2400 (IIRC) baud serial signal such that an IR receiver seeing the signal will output a TTL UART signal. IRDA is much more complex.
That sounds very plausible to me. I suspect the instruction manual might mention that, since if it ran low you'd need to know to only replace the thigh batteries
SRAM would be actually a smart idea for the day, as EEPOM or flash of suitable size would have been prohibitively expensive or too power intensive to drive.
That final comment, about what a parent could have done when gifting, would have made so many kids christmas/birthdays/whatever. It would have certainly blown my mind as a kid.
I did this for my daughter when she was very young. Except it wasn't a Barbie, it was a LeapFrog My Pal Scout or whatever it was called. It's pretty much the exact same concept as this, except it's a plushie dog that talks instead. And yes, her reaction was priceless when she heard it saying her name and having the same favorite food as her.
More vintage electronic toy content, Barbie, LEGO, or otherwise, is totally welcome. This is the kind of stuff that kids would look at in the Sears Catalog and wish for but rarely got, so it's cool to see it now.
There is a file in the Data directory called names.big. It makes reference to SUNPLUS SPEECH, and is over 100MB. I think it may contain the audio samples for the names.
It was probably good that custom text couldn't be loaded onto it... "Shelby, let's find where daddy keeps the matches" "Let's go play on the railway!" "I like drinking gin, what's your favourite drink?" 😂
Thank you very much for this video, I collect Barbie dolls and I have been wanting to see how this doll works for years, whenever I saw reviews on doll channels and they never showed what it was like to see it in action, it is incredible to see the number of names that were already included
Man, I remember drooling over Micron machines in catalogs back in the day but have never seen one in person. This is actually the first time seeing one even in a video. Very cool.
When I was a kid the only things that really talked had strings you pulled which played a record inside the unit. They might have had speak and spell, but I don't know cause I didn't have one. My single digit ages were in the decade of the 70s. This kind of stuff just didn't exist.
I used Lego Mindstorms NXT a lot when I was in school (I was in a First Tech Challenge league in HS). However, what kicked off the project was me and a few other people using that original Mindstorms kit you mentioned in the video when I was in middle school. That would definitely be interesting to see because that was all graphic programming with blocks, where NXT could do that as well as a custom C compiler written for FTC. While obviously primitive by today's standards, I would say the original Mindstorms is FAR more powerful than it seems. Especially for those used to "Just Lego Bricks".
@@Toxicity1987 Yeah, got to say Mindstorms sort of regressed over the years, with newest being most biased towards small kids, not being able to be as creative. NXT was the best in my eyes
@@tomclanys Wouldn't agree to that, RI and SP are both just more colorful, but they have way more parts and you can program python on them without any mods. Also the Modules are more flexible, have connections on all sides and so on.
I have to confess that I, a middle aged guy, did not have "Watch another grown man play with his 25 year old Barbie doll" on my bingo sheet for a Saturday night. 😂 But... I was entertained all the same! 👍
Well, it's not like he broke out a toy horse and a Ken doll and had jolly adventures in his backyard. We are all interested in how the technology works.....THEN we play with it hahaha.
23:53 - Considering I have only learned that this was a thing in this excellent video and considering I have a very young daughter, I'm going to try and let your scenario play out now that I found one new in a box. 🥰
This is absolutely fascinating! I'd definitely be curious to see how the file format works, and am curious how the custom name program worked logistically. Did Mattel have the official voice actor do the voices and bring the actor in the studio whenever they needed a new batch of custom lines done? I feel like that would be quite a hassle for the actor and team, but...
Yeah, the problem is you could not allow this to get into the world without Mattel totally in control of every single word that could theoretically come out of its mouth. A big brother could do some serious damage to a little girl by his getting hold of the doll and changing all the phrases to things like "when you fall asleep, I'm gonna kill you Lisa!!!" or "Lisa, I think your mother hates you" and the like.
I just bought one of these (just the doll) at a GW for $1.99, unaware of the computer aspect. I thought maybe she talked or sang and her necklace lit up, but she didn't have batteries. I only had AAAs so put them in to see if the mouth would move or any demo clips would play, but nada. It's still a pretty doll for my granddaughter to play with, but if it randomly starts talking, it's going in the burn pit. No eyelashes. Only shoulders and hips move. The necklace is attached to the doll. The hair is surprisingly nice and soft. She's been played with and had the typical too large, girl's ponytail holder the kid put on her. Usually hair that old is horrible frizz mesh by now, but it combed through easily. She's in such good condition I bet if I put all of the batteries in, she would say the name of the kid she belonged to, and possibly who shot JFK
The „Intel inside“ logo is hilarious because that means that this toy was part of Intel‘s marketing partner program and Intel actually paid some of the costs related to marketing and advertising for this
Logic analyzer on the serial interface is probably the best tool for the job. Reverse engineering the software is probably the best way to figure out the formatting.
Having the receiver be a pendant and the dock be a mini PC is clever as heck. Her posture is terrible though! It's not surprising that it has so many "boy" names, since it can talk about your brothers and friends.
Dude, please do a Lego Mindstorms video!! I had the main kit and a few add on kits and I remember them being the coolest thing ever when I was a kid. Very interesting and fairly powerful visual programming software as well, seems right up your alley and would fit well on the channel. I think it ran on Windows 2000? Not sure though…
More Barby content could be capturing the IR data, and seeing if you can decipher it. Or looking at the program files to see if they have individual files for each phrase that is in PCM or some other format.
It must be uploading sample data but it's probably a hardcore codec of the age - so something proprietary and related to telephone codecs most likely given they almost certainly didn't create a custom chip.
22:15 I bet in the folder structure of the software itself there is the files for the 14000 standard names using those you can probably figure out the file format and the distinction for custom names is probably just a dot BCN extension. If I had to guess it's an audio file and stereo with one channel being audio and the other channel being servo control Teddy ruxpin style.
My thought was to use an IR receiver or serial tap to intercept the data being sent to the doll from the programmer. However, this is a much better idea. Just look at the resources installed on disk, if they are separate resources, and easy to look at.
I was one of those folks with an original LEGO Mindstorms set with the RCX. The first generation IR tower was serial and needed an internal 9V battery, the second gen with RIS 2.0 was USB. Good times...
I'd be interested in seeing a capture of the IR signal. You could probably reverse engineer a lot from just that and get custom samples into the barbie doll that way.
I absolutely love that you put this video out... there are so many things like this that have been lost to time ... keeping the old stuff alive is a thankless job and im so glad your on it
It could have been, the lights I film with I believe are using constant current control instead of PWM so they don't flicker. I also turned down the baud rate while trying to figure out that it meant to *hold* the button. So that could have helped.
I recall reading somewhere that the loading screen game patent thing wasn't necessarily valid, or contentious at best, and only pertained to some very specific things.
I have something like this but it's SpongeBob (there's also other characters like Dora, Elmo, etc.), it connects with USB-B on the dolls end and a regular USB connector on the other, and the custom names situation is pretty much the exact same with none of it being archived. The samples are a form of ADPCM so it should 100% be possible to reverse engineer (Most basic thing you can do is swap files around so that he can call you like, Squidward or something). I myself want to program a new UI because the old one crashes on modern versions of Windows.. the parameters are set with a plaintext document and once you know what's what you can just set everything from that and run an EXE that doesn't show anything to program the doll. Considering Fisher Price is part of Mattel I wouldn't be surprised if this doll works in exactly the same way I haven't gotten that far into the video yet 😅
I find it very funny that you can ask Mattel to record a specific name for you. Them booking a recording session for the Barbie VA just to say one name and then converting and sending it to some parents. Lol
9:08 Hello, it is possible to create a format with cues to the motors but it is also possible to solve this as a switch operating of signal energy threshold, vowels tend to have higher energy than consonants.
Interesting video. I guess the privacy wasn't really a concern in the early internet days since no one was constantly online. Would love to see Lego Mindstorm on this channel, mind you :)
Tyco R/C: Assault with a Battery's NTSC-U print contains two different loading screen minigames. They were removed from the later NTSC-J print. Mattel did not develop Tyco RC, but it's possible they gave the devs a tip to put it in there.
If the samples it sends are stereo, I almost wonder if the syllable data just uses one of the channels to play a tone that a circuit picks up and moves the motor. Maybe it's just like a digital version of all those old tape based toys Techmoan has showcased.
I wonder if the data for like names and stuff is installed in a slightly-different format from the custom ones, and if it's possible to reverse-engineer the .bcn format from that?
Admit it... you had a thing for Barbie didn't you?!? No matter what you video, you make it interesting and do such a deep dive. My daughter had this along with a plethora of other Barbie software titles. She enjoyed it for a while. This girl used to sit on my lap at 3 and play DOOM, and at 4 got into X-Files until 9 or 10. Now at 27 she has her Doctorate in Criminology. Go figure. The doll interface reminds me of the Timex Datalink watch, but that used a series of lines and blips on a CRT to transmit the data to the watch.
Very cool! Great video but I would have liked to have seen you dig through the files on the computer and on the CD more. It felt like the search to understand the BCN file format was cut to short.
My cousin had this doll and we took her to the ocean to get rid of her because Small Soldiers had come out like a couple months after and the dolls looked like barbie and their mouths moved and she got scared the doll was alive.
I wanted and received this as a child. We had to return it because we couldn’t get it to work, I was crushed. I’m pretty sure it didn’t work because we had to use an adapter for the serial com
Really glad someone made this! Think that would have made a very special toy for any child. Especially if they got it young enough, like you mentioned, would be magical.
imagine Shelby opening the box and Barbie says : "Me, Frank Horrigan, that's who. United States Secret Service. You aren't going anywhere from here." Fallout vibes :)
I found it odd and somewhat amusing that the button press thing stumped you for *10 minutes* 😅 given your level of technical expertise (far beyond mine). I dunno if it’s spending the last few decades with electronics finding more and more ways to make use of less and less buttons but I picked up what the software intended the moment the presenter said “press until”. I thought it was worded perfectly fine.
Actually i did a Instagram Live Review a few years ago of the “Talk with me Barbie” doll where i demonstrated how this doll works and how you program her by using my old and trusty Acer Laptop from the late 90s which still runs on Windows 95.😊
I bought one recently and I was wondering how it actually worked because mine only says "Hi, let's go to the computer and play" Thanks for showing this
I collect dolls, and I would love one of these in my collection. (Don't have an old PC with serial port though, so not gonna hunt one down.) I would also love to dig through the software for the sound files. They have to be in there somewhere.
@@alameachan it probably doesn't but you can just spin up VirtualBox with any old version of Windows and pass the USB through to that. Though this means you need to find a USB serial adapter ideally that's old enough to work in that version, some good old Prolific or FTDI.
@@SianaGearz Thanks for the pointers. Looks like I have some challenges to overcome. Most difficult will probably be to source a doll in such mint condition for a reasonable price. But yeah - challenges!
I'm disappointed you didn't install serial monitoring software (or hardware). You would get a lot of data to analyse. I also didn't see you take a look at the installed files. The custom stuff might have a BCN extension, but I expect the included samples have the exact same format, just a different extension. It would be so much fun to have it say truly custom things.
I'm assuming the doll's voice is programmed into the software, and that it only downloads as many phrases as the doll's on-board memory has space for. So, if someone was to hack the software to allow for actual custom phrases, it probably wouldn't work without the matching sound bites. It's too bad, because I'd love to hear Barbie use dark phrases, like the _Dreadful Dolls_ Halloween toys: "Your mommy hates you."
If you enjoy macabre humor, _Dreadful Dolls_ are fun. The specific doll I referred to, resembles Lydia Deetz from _Beetlejuice,_ and has four phrases: "I don't like happy people." "There's something in the closet." "I love you to DEATH." "Your mommy hates you."
Mindstorms sounds good! Maybe get NQC going or program it via Word VBA! (Yes that was a thing, I did it. Still have the programmable brick and the IR tower. I still use the null modem cable it came with for most serial port things.)
I have one of those original mindstorms! i wonder if the drivers are still around, or if i might even have them, If i rememeber correctly i used the family winXp computer to program it, happy memories :p
Excelent video, very complete , by the way, Julian from the channel "LianPal" made 2 videos 3 years ago, one unboxing that doll and the second one testing the doll. "¡Esta Barbie sabe todo sobre tí! | Talk With Me Barbie RETROREVIEW" is the name of the vid where he demostranted how the doll and its software works, the video is in Spanish but the doll is the English version one. Greetings from Mexico.
Man this reminds me of the LGR video that he did with Pushing up Roses on a Barbie Mystery PC game and it was very creepy the way it was saying the names it knew. Makes me wonder how many girls actually had this back in 1997. Yeah I am sure that many girls who had this who had parents who had vast PC knowledge to setup the Barbie doll to say their name would have their minds blown away. If there was a toy that was similar to this that was geared towards boys I would had my mind blown.
I'd love to see more about Mindstorms.I bought one as an optional extra for an Open University course I was doing (running a simulator was an alternative). I later gave it away.
Maybe it'd be possible to just connect to some PC with a null modem cable (instead of the toy "computer") and observe the data stream from the program during a doll "programming" process...
I had this doll. My parents bought it for me at a swapmeet back in those days. I never programmed her because I was like 9, I saw one on eBay right now and got curious about how the doll sounds and how it would’ve worked had I programmed her, so, here I am.
I would love to see Lego Mindstorms. I haven't played with that stuff in 20 years and never owned any of it. Also do you still have that little pc with small monitor that had the Voodoo 2? I think this would have been a great time to bring that out.
I know you're twitchy about the PII but 25 years ago is basically pre-internet; no one really thought about such things, because at worst the information would travel to nearby friends/family/schoomates and not much else because there was no easy way of transmitting such things before cheap audio and video recorders came about. The past really is another country. :)
I had this as a kid. I had no idea it was so expensive! My pet ferret ripped the plastic off her face and exposed the jaw mechanism. 😅
Did she look like a terminator underneath?
With a little custom speech, one could make something worthy of Sid (Toy Story) with the ripped off face!🤣
Yall seen small soldiers? Underrated movie
Nothing can defeat Barbie - her posse probably did a number on that Ferret
Spooky!
Seeing Barbie in a chair at a computer is the most relatable a Barbie has ever looked and now I can’t stop picturing her at a 9-5 desk job.
Edit to add: As someone who was (and still very much is) completely enamored with Barbie Horseback Riding for PC, I am incredibly thrilled that that was the activity you went with out of so many (very cool, as to be expected) options.
Having worked in the toy industry previously... The syllable-based mouth movements may or may not actually be syllable-based. You'd be surprised what you can do with a bit of hysteresis and level thresholds on a PCM stream. But the toy industry also has a lot of audio file formats that let you embed "events" in the audio stream, so you can trigger things like this mouth movement at the appropriate time. A lot of toys that have light shows synced to audio will use this, too, 'cus it makes it /much/ easier to synchronize things when the audio file itself contains the cues. Surprisingly, this is actually a functionality available in WAV files, with CUE markers, though usually they'll get re-encoded down to a much easier to parse format for microcontrollers.
Looking closer at the mouth during the "how many phrases will we get" sequence, I'm pretty sure it's threshold based, not syllable-based. Phrase #3 ("I love to see the flowers by a mountain trail"), it triggers on "I" and "Love", but then misses "to see" entirely and that "t" sounds like it got mangled by the audio compression making it quieter.
I dug through the ISO on the internet archive a bit, and I found the files that contain all the name audio data. I recognize the file format, 'cus it's an ancient ancestor of the files I worked with. If you can figure out the encoder settings, it probably wouldn't be hard to add more names to the list. Also, there are no events embedded in the audio files. The pointer that would lead to the event table is empty, which is how they indicate that there are no events.
Unfortunately it looks like this particular audio format's been removed from the "current" version of the encoder software, and I can't find a version old enough to support it.
I hope he sees this. A few more details on the name of the format might be useful? I'm quite curious what the encoding is myself. Could you see what variety of CIR it uses?
@@Izzy84075 Out of interest what is the software called?
Regarding the custom file format, you could maybe check to see if the ones included in the CD have a similar structure to what you would expect the .bcn format would have? Failing someone sending you an actual .bcn file it might be a great start point to reverse engineer this thing.
Can't believe LGR hasn't done this one already. Seems like a perfect episode for Oddware.
"Clint!"
@@MadMorgie6318 Guessing you're referencing that play through he did of that Barbie point and click game with Pushing Up Roses?
I’ve been aware of it for years and I’ve always wanted to cover it! I have never run across one in my normal travels though, not complete anyway.
Shelby did a great job preserving the experience though 👍
@@alfredklek Indeed so!
Also perfect to use with his Barbie PC!
i'm 53 and i just watched another grownup play with an old barbie doll HAHAHAHA. Modern life in retro is a fun yet strange place at times.
A few years ago, I was in the audience for a panel with Jim Cummings, the voice actor. Someone asked him about recording the voice lines for a customizable talking Pooh doll. Apparently it was ARDUOUS, with hours upon hours of reading off names and awkwardly cut-off sentences. He said even he started catching himself doing the Pooh voice at drive-thrus and answering the phone. He had already been the primary VO for Pooh for over a decade at that point, so you'd think he would have been used to it. But there was just so much material to get through...
I pity the poor VA who had to record all these Barbie lines, then go back and record the custom requests for who knows how long afterward Maybe the tinny little speaker and low bitrate made soundalikes less obvious.
This era of Barbie was voiced by Chris Anthony Lansdowne, a really talented woman. She has recounted getting hired by Mattel in interviews before, and she said that she was reading names every single day, all day, for months. It was the first thing she did for the company. She jokes about going a little insane during the process. The Detective Barbie game, released a couple of years later, also has over 50K names, I am assuming most of which were used from this product.
This pairs perfect with the Barbie PC!
Beat me to saying this
Tell that to LGR
Lgr make that episode happen
I want a Barbie PC so bad - I'm so fed up of the evil alien mothership design asthetic of modern PCs - I want a friendly, happy PC
16:53 - The patent expired in 2015, deal now is everything loads so fast no one got to make any genuine use of that.
22:58 - I wouldn't be surprised if the mouth movement was just controlled by making the barbie voice on one channel with a mono speaker and the other channel having the control data.
I just noticed how the doll initially only said "Hi, let's get to the computer and play".
Presumably a factory setting to nudge new owners into setting up the computer connection and not just keep it in the default mode.
Glad you have a lav mic that works perfectly as a handheld microphone for barbie. She's all ready to do videos on retro computers.
I got super excited when Codsworth from Fallout 4 said my name, and I'm a grown adult. I couldn't imagine how I'd feel if my parents did what Shelby mentioned at the end. You've got a good heart, Shelby.
Pausing at 1:53 to say that the Lego Mindstorms RCX doesn't actually use IRDA, it just modulates a 38KHz carrier with the 2400 (IIRC) baud serial signal such that an IR receiver seeing the signal will output a TTL UART signal. IRDA is much more complex.
Sounds like they used NEC protocol CIR hardware
hm, cool toy.
I wonder if those LR44 coin cells are for SRAM backup inside the doll and the larger cells are for the toys operation.
That sounds very plausible to me. I suspect the instruction manual might mention that, since if it ran low you'd need to know to only replace the thigh batteries
SRAM would be actually a smart idea for the day, as EEPOM or flash of suitable size would have been prohibitively expensive or too power intensive to drive.
That final comment, about what a parent could have done when gifting, would have made so many kids christmas/birthdays/whatever. It would have certainly blown my mind as a kid.
On the flip side, it would be funny if it caused a kid to scream in terror, throw it down, and the family dog to attack it.
I did this for my daughter when she was very young. Except it wasn't a Barbie, it was a LeapFrog My Pal Scout or whatever it was called. It's pretty much the exact same concept as this, except it's a plushie dog that talks instead. And yes, her reaction was priceless when she heard it saying her name and having the same favorite food as her.
So if it's not a Genuine Intel(TM) chip inside the computer, you might wonder, is Barbie running an AMD or even a Cyrix system?
I expected there to be some kind of Intel microcontroller managing the IR.
Also, love how you have barbie holding the lapel mic. Perhaps she could co star in the next video ? 😅
It was so cute when she said "Goodbye!" at the end 😂
More vintage electronic toy content, Barbie, LEGO, or otherwise, is totally welcome. This is the kind of stuff that kids would look at in the Sears Catalog and wish for but rarely got, so it's cool to see it now.
There is a file in the Data directory called names.big. It makes reference to SUNPLUS SPEECH, and is over 100MB. I think it may contain the audio samples for the names.
I just googled a little, maybe it's using the SunPlus SPC81A, which is also used in Furbies.
You ought to have a Barbie PC for this
to make the set even more, you know what
this right here is why we need LGR and Tech Tangents collabs more often
@@rawr51919
If the two could be bought together? a new dawn of Barbie shall sweep across the internet and all shall be glorious
Silly Mattel, why put "Intel Inside" on the tiniest pentium, when you could have put "Mattel Inside"
I simply cannot un-see the "Small Soldiers" in that mouth movement. Wow. Not to mention that this came out a year before the movie was released.
"You are the best of the best of the few and the proud!" ^-^
There will be no mercy.
It was probably good that custom text couldn't be loaded onto it...
"Shelby, let's find where daddy keeps the matches"
"Let's go play on the railway!"
"I like drinking gin, what's your favourite drink?"
😂
Of course, anything is possible with a little hacking and a microphone. ;)
Thank you very much for this video, I collect Barbie dolls and I have been wanting to see how this doll works for years, whenever I saw reviews on doll channels and they never showed what it was like to see it in action, it is incredible to see the number of names that were already included
Man, I remember drooling over Micron machines in catalogs back in the day but have never seen one in person. This is actually the first time seeing one even in a video. Very cool.
When I was a kid the only things that really talked had strings you pulled which played a record inside the unit. They might have had speak and spell, but I don't know cause I didn't have one. My single digit ages were in the decade of the 70s. This kind of stuff just didn't exist.
I remember LGR playing Detective Barbie and I think the samples were reused in this one as well. Clint!
I used Lego Mindstorms NXT a lot when I was in school (I was in a First Tech Challenge league in HS). However, what kicked off the project was me and a few other people using that original Mindstorms kit you mentioned in the video when I was in middle school. That would definitely be interesting to see because that was all graphic programming with blocks, where NXT could do that as well as a custom C compiler written for FTC.
While obviously primitive by today's standards, I would say the original Mindstorms is FAR more powerful than it seems. Especially for those used to "Just Lego Bricks".
They still use that graphical programming as of today (with the Robot Inventor/Spike Prime kit), nowadays they even forked Scratch for that purpose.
@@Toxicity1987 Yeah, got to say Mindstorms sort of regressed over the years, with newest being most biased towards small kids, not being able to be as creative. NXT was the best in my eyes
@@tomclanys Wouldn't agree to that, RI and SP are both just more colorful, but they have way more parts and you can program python on them without any mods. Also the Modules are more flexible, have connections on all sides and so on.
I have to confess that I, a middle aged guy, did not have "Watch another grown man play with his 25 year old Barbie doll" on my bingo sheet for a Saturday night. 😂
But... I was entertained all the same! 👍
Well, it's not like he broke out a toy horse and a Ken doll and had jolly adventures in his backyard. We are all interested in how the technology works.....THEN we play with it hahaha.
its a good thing its not internet connected, its an data mining advertisers dream
I never would let some voice generated thing into my room that says random phrases and knows everything about me....
No, shut up alexa. Not now!!!
23:53 - Considering I have only learned that this was a thing in this excellent video and considering I have a very young daughter, I'm going to try and let your scenario play out now that I found one new in a box. 🥰
Lego mondstorms was not standard irda, it also needed it's own receiver. I know, I still own mine.
This is absolutely fascinating! I'd definitely be curious to see how the file format works, and am curious how the custom name program worked logistically. Did Mattel have the official voice actor do the voices and bring the actor in the studio whenever they needed a new batch of custom lines done? I feel like that would be quite a hassle for the actor and team, but...
Yeah, the problem is you could not allow this to get into the world without Mattel totally in control of every single word that could theoretically come out of its mouth. A big brother could do some serious damage to a little girl by his getting hold of the doll and changing all the phrases to things like "when you fall asleep, I'm gonna kill you Lisa!!!" or "Lisa, I think your mother hates you" and the like.
@@tarstarkusz that's Malibu Stacy, not Barbie ;)
I just bought one of these (just the doll) at a GW for $1.99, unaware of the computer aspect. I thought maybe she talked or sang and her necklace lit up, but she didn't have batteries. I only had AAAs so put them in to see if the mouth would move or any demo clips would play, but nada. It's still a pretty doll for my granddaughter to play with, but if it randomly starts talking, it's going in the burn pit. No eyelashes. Only shoulders and hips move. The necklace is attached to the doll. The hair is surprisingly nice and soft. She's been played with and had the typical too large, girl's ponytail holder the kid put on her. Usually hair that old is horrible frizz mesh by now, but it combed through easily. She's in such good condition I bet if I put all of the batteries in, she would say the name of the kid she belonged to, and possibly who shot JFK
That Laserdisc joke right at the start is great!
The „Intel inside“ logo is hilarious because that means that this toy was part of Intel‘s marketing partner program and Intel actually paid some of the costs related to marketing and advertising for this
Im sure it was. Patriot Computers made Barbie PC shipped with Intel branded board and displays "Intel INSIDE" splash screen during boot.
It's so funny seeing this. My sisters had and used this back in the late 90s.
I wonder if you could use a capturing oscilliscope and an IR LDR to read the data stream and decode the format that way.
Logic analyzer on the serial interface is probably the best tool for the job.
Reverse engineering the software is probably the best way to figure out the formatting.
Having the receiver be a pendant and the dock be a mini PC is clever as heck. Her posture is terrible though!
It's not surprising that it has so many "boy" names, since it can talk about your brothers and friends.
Dude, please do a Lego Mindstorms video!! I had the main kit and a few add on kits and I remember them being the coolest thing ever when I was a kid. Very interesting and fairly powerful visual programming software as well, seems right up your alley and would fit well on the channel. I think it ran on Windows 2000? Not sure though…
Tech archaeology is always worth it!
More Barby content could be capturing the IR data, and seeing if you can decipher it. Or looking at the program files to see if they have individual files for each phrase that is in PCM or some other format.
It must be uploading sample data but it's probably a hardcore codec of the age - so something proprietary and related to telephone codecs most likely given they almost certainly didn't create a custom chip.
22:15 I bet in the folder structure of the software itself there is the files for the 14000 standard names using those you can probably figure out the file format and the distinction for custom names is probably just a dot BCN extension. If I had to guess it's an audio file and stereo with one channel being audio and the other channel being servo control Teddy ruxpin style.
My thought was to use an IR receiver or serial tap to intercept the data being sent to the doll from the programmer. However, this is a much better idea. Just look at the resources installed on disk, if they are separate resources, and easy to look at.
I was one of those folks with an original LEGO Mindstorms set with the RCX. The first generation IR tower was serial and needed an internal 9V battery, the second gen with RIS 2.0 was USB. Good times...
I'd be interested in seeing a capture of the IR signal. You could probably reverse engineer a lot from just that and get custom samples into the barbie doll that way.
I absolutely love that you put this video out... there are so many things like this that have been lost to time ... keeping the old stuff alive is a thankless job and im so glad your on it
I tried to make mine work! I failed. I think maybe my LED lights were interfering?
It could have been, the lights I film with I believe are using constant current control instead of PWM so they don't flicker. I also turned down the baud rate while trying to figure out that it meant to *hold* the button. So that could have helped.
The idea of having to sit in an entirely darkened room with a Barbie chattering away is entirely on brand for you.
@@wraithcadmus - If you are sitting in a totally dark room while a Barbie doll from the past talks about horses? you've made it in life
Tell Barbie your mother's maiden name and the name of your first pet.
I love that little computer. I want something like that so I can put my other action figures in front of a computer!
This was actually pretty cool!
Would love to see a video on Lego Mindstorms.
I recall reading somewhere that the loading screen game patent thing wasn't necessarily valid, or contentious at best, and only pertained to some very specific things.
I have something like this but it's SpongeBob (there's also other characters like Dora, Elmo, etc.), it connects with USB-B on the dolls end and a regular USB connector on the other, and the custom names situation is pretty much the exact same with none of it being archived. The samples are a form of ADPCM so it should 100% be possible to reverse engineer (Most basic thing you can do is swap files around so that he can call you like, Squidward or something). I myself want to program a new UI because the old one crashes on modern versions of Windows.. the parameters are set with a plaintext document and once you know what's what you can just set everything from that and run an EXE that doesn't show anything to program the doll.
Considering Fisher Price is part of Mattel I wouldn't be surprised if this doll works in exactly the same way I haven't gotten that far into the video yet 😅
I find it very funny that you can ask Mattel to record a specific name for you.
Them booking a recording session for the Barbie VA just to say one name and then converting and sending it to some parents. Lol
9:08 Hello, it is possible to create a format with cues to the motors but it is also possible to solve this as a switch operating of signal energy threshold, vowels tend to have higher energy than consonants.
Now let's forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream!
I wish they taught shopping in school!
Interesting video. I guess the privacy wasn't really a concern in the early internet days since no one was constantly online. Would love to see Lego Mindstorm on this channel, mind you :)
Tyco R/C: Assault with a Battery's NTSC-U print contains two different loading screen minigames. They were removed from the later NTSC-J print. Mattel did not develop Tyco RC, but it's possible they gave the devs a tip to put it in there.
I wonder if the patent only applies to loading screens in video games.
@@renakunisaki It's a ps1 game.
If the samples it sends are stereo, I almost wonder if the syllable data just uses one of the channels to play a tone that a circuit picks up and moves the motor. Maybe it's just like a digital version of all those old tape based toys Techmoan has showcased.
I had this when I was 4 or 5 years old! It was so cool!
I wonder if the data for like names and stuff is installed in a slightly-different format from the custom ones, and if it's possible to reverse-engineer the .bcn format from that?
Admit it... you had a thing for Barbie didn't you?!? No matter what you video, you make it interesting and do such a deep dive. My daughter had this along with a plethora of other Barbie software titles. She enjoyed it for a while. This girl used to sit on my lap at 3 and play DOOM, and at 4 got into X-Files until 9 or 10. Now at 27 she has her Doctorate in Criminology. Go figure. The doll interface reminds me of the Timex Datalink watch, but that used a series of lines and blips on a CRT to transmit the data to the watch.
I never knew they made this holy cow!!
Very cool! Great video but I would have liked to have seen you dig through the files on the computer and on the CD more. It felt like the search to understand the BCN file format was cut to short.
Unusual vid indeed, but I liked it. Would have liked to see a tear-down and/or tinkering to make her say naughty stuff.
Lol! Porn star Barbie! 😂😂
My cousin had this doll and we took her to the ocean to get rid of her because Small Soldiers had come out like a couple months after and the dolls looked like barbie and their mouths moved and she got scared the doll was alive.
I wanted and received this as a child. We had to return it because we couldn’t get it to work, I was crushed. I’m pretty sure it didn’t work because we had to use an adapter for the serial com
Clint did that weird video on the NSYNC phone on LGR, so why not Shellby do a video on something just as awkward?
Really glad someone made this! Think that would have made a very special toy for any child. Especially if they got it young enough, like you mentioned, would be magical.
imagine Shelby opening the box and Barbie says : "Me, Frank Horrigan, that's who. United States Secret Service. You aren't going anywhere from here." Fallout vibes :)
Can't believe nobody in the QA department caught "Open Cutsom Name File".
That reminds me of the setup program for Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack which spelled it 'Entertainmnet' in the title bar 😆
Jeeze, did Barbie always have that giraffe neck?
Great video. Please do more 90s computer toy videos like this! They're very interesting
Love when you cover bizarre old tech. Good work.
I found it odd and somewhat amusing that the button press thing stumped you for *10 minutes* 😅 given your level of technical expertise (far beyond mine). I dunno if it’s spending the last few decades with electronics finding more and more ways to make use of less and less buttons but I picked up what the software intended the moment the presenter said “press until”. I thought it was worded perfectly fine.
Actually i did a Instagram Live Review a few years ago of the “Talk with me Barbie” doll where i demonstrated how this doll works and how you program her by using my old and trusty Acer Laptop from the late 90s which still runs on Windows 95.😊
I bought one recently and I was wondering how it actually worked because mine only says "Hi, let's go to the computer and play"
Thanks for showing this
I collect dolls, and I would love one of these in my collection. (Don't have an old PC with serial port though, so not gonna hunt one down.) I would also love to dig through the software for the sound files. They have to be in there somewhere.
You can probably just use a usb serial adapter.
@@SianaGearz That would be interesting to try. Also if the software still runs on modern 64bit Windows.
@@alameachan it probably doesn't but you can just spin up VirtualBox with any old version of Windows and pass the USB through to that. Though this means you need to find a USB serial adapter ideally that's old enough to work in that version, some good old Prolific or FTDI.
@@SianaGearz Thanks for the pointers. Looks like I have some challenges to overcome. Most difficult will probably be to source a doll in such mint condition for a reasonable price. But yeah - challenges!
If you collect them, wouldn’t you just keep it sealed in the box, just like Shelby should have done?
My sister had one of these, I don't think I ever saw it working as a kid but it still all worked as a normal Barbie doll.
I'm disappointed you didn't install serial monitoring software (or hardware). You would get a lot of data to analyse.
I also didn't see you take a look at the installed files. The custom stuff might have a BCN extension, but I expect the included samples have the exact same format, just a different extension.
It would be so much fun to have it say truly custom things.
Super interesting! Looking forward to more Shelby retro toy reviews. 😂
Thanks for documenting this. Very nice to see this toy in action.
I'm assuming the doll's voice is programmed into the software, and that it only downloads as many phrases as the doll's on-board memory has space for. So, if someone was to hack the software to allow for actual custom phrases, it probably wouldn't work without the matching sound bites. It's too bad, because I'd love to hear Barbie use dark phrases, like the _Dreadful Dolls_ Halloween toys: "Your mommy hates you."
If you enjoy macabre humor, _Dreadful Dolls_ are fun. The specific doll I referred to, resembles Lydia Deetz from _Beetlejuice,_ and has four phrases: "I don't like happy people." "There's something in the closet." "I love you to DEATH." "Your mommy hates you."
Mindstorms sounds good! Maybe get NQC going or program it via Word VBA! (Yes that was a thing, I did it. Still have the programmable brick and the IR tower. I still use the null modem cable it came with for most serial port things.)
Explorer the cd and install folders for wav files etc
i just stumbled upon one while thrifting today and now i have a need to see if i can revive her using modern tech to make custom lines
I loved this doll when I was a kid! I remember wishing she had more to say though, after a while!😂 Her outfit was soo lovely! I miss this girl now..
I have one of those original mindstorms! i wonder if the drivers are still around, or if i might even have them, If i rememeber correctly i used the family winXp computer to program it, happy memories :p
Im so happy you did it! Thank you
Lament to the kid named Frederica
Excelent video, very complete , by the way, Julian from the channel "LianPal" made 2 videos 3 years ago, one unboxing that doll and the second one testing the doll. "¡Esta Barbie sabe todo sobre tí! | Talk With Me Barbie RETROREVIEW" is the name of the vid where he demostranted how the doll and its software works, the video is in Spanish but the doll is the English version one. Greetings from Mexico.
Man this reminds me of the LGR video that he did with Pushing up Roses on a Barbie Mystery PC game and it was very creepy the way it was saying the names it knew. Makes me wonder how many girls actually had this back in 1997. Yeah I am sure that many girls who had this who had parents who had vast PC knowledge to setup the Barbie doll to say their name would have their minds blown away. If there was a toy that was similar to this that was geared towards boys I would had my mind blown.
If the IR was two way I'd be looking out for a Barbie Botnet.
I'd love to see more about Mindstorms.I bought one as an optional extra for an Open University course I was doing (running a simulator was an alternative). I later gave it away.
Maybe it'd be possible to just connect to some PC with a null modem cable (instead of the toy "computer") and observe the data stream from the program during a doll "programming" process...
I had this doll. My parents bought it for me at a swapmeet back in those days. I never programmed her because I was like 9, I saw one on eBay right now and got curious about how the doll sounds and how it would’ve worked had I programmed her, so, here I am.
I would love to see Lego Mindstorms. I haven't played with that stuff in 20 years and never owned any of it. Also do you still have that little pc with small monitor that had the Voodoo 2? I think this would have been a great time to bring that out.
Oh this is one of the coolest barbies I’ve ever seen
This CD is on the internet archive.
I know you're twitchy about the PII but 25 years ago is basically pre-internet; no one really thought about such things, because at worst the information would travel to nearby friends/family/schoomates and not much else because there was no easy way of transmitting such things before cheap audio and video recorders came about. The past really is another country. :)
Pretty cool for 97! That was fun thx