SethRobinson

Got my bdoi modded Lynx today, can concur, it looks and works great. Would recommend

Not really, interesting stuff! Looks like the device could scan as well as print for $200 in 1985, advanced for the time. Sadly, nobody seems to have put a working demo on youtube yet, would like to see it in action. (You hear that, anybody who owns a working one?! Get on it!) In retrospect, their only chance of (even moderate) success was probably to make the format completely open (as QR codes did, it was patented only to protect it and open it to everyone from the get go) but in 1985 that was probably a pretty foreign concept for tech like this. I can't find any documentation on the format itself (wow, that's rare to find these days) but I suspect it had no error-correction and probably just basic CRC checks or something. But 50K data on a single magazine page is quite a lot for that day and age.

If you don't mind not being officially compatible with real QR code readers (not that your iPhone's vanilla reader knows what to do with the binary data anyway) you CAN just change the max "code size" in the QR writer/reader source code (I used zbar) for a special custom version that can go bigger. Would depend on the QR size, lighting, and camera quality for how finicky it would be to read more complex codes, so it's kind of a tradeoff. I probably could have gotten it to fit on one QR code if I really wanted, didn't try it though.

Hey, I had the same idea about QR codes. It does work pretty well, had to use a "side B" for the larger 4 kb games like Pitfall!, but it does work!

If you like QR codes and Raspberry Pi emulation, check out my PaperCart project: Full blog post with source code and junk