Intellivoice for the ColecoVision?

[Pixelboy]

Very interesting idea. Admittedly I didn't quite get the bar code reader thing until you mentioned playing cards. I now get it.

I'm not sure what kind of pack-in game I would devise, but it would probably be some kind of Risk clone, where players would have military resources (troops, tanks, planes, etc.) in the form of playing cards with bar codes on them, and when a player uses a card, he scans it into the barcode reader before putting it on the discard pile. And the game would contain lots of war-themed speech ("Die! Die!", "Bombs Away!", "Take no prisoners!", "Retreat! Retreat!" etc.).

 

 

After thinking about this more, I would bet that more people would be interest in a sound module than the SGM. I'm just guessing, but I have a feeling a sound module would be cheaper to implement as well. The hard part will be getting the programers to program for it.

It certainly would not be cheaper. The SGM only contains a 32K RAM chip, an MSX sound chip, and some other components to "glue" everything together, nothing terribly expensive. Perhaps the speech component of this theoretical add-on wouldn't cost a lot, but the barcode reader component is bound to cost some money. And then there's the issue of the extra electronics required to make the voice synthesizer independent of the ColecoVision's CPU (perhaps not trivial at all) and the "bridge software" between the ColecoVision and the barcode reader. I expect there's nothing impossible there to implement, but there would be a production cost associated with it.

 

 

One other thought. If sound can be passed from the expansion port, why not put a head phone jack and volume control on it too? Seems like that would be a no brainer at that point. Just a thought.

That idea is as good as any, but if there's one thing I've learned from Eduardo and his SGM project, it's that in the end, you just want to keep costs down, and so you just implement the bare minimum and you're happy with the final product.

[youki]

For the Barcode Reader, I was just thinking something like this.

 

Why to not use smart phone?.

 

A little device you plug on the colecovision that would communicate with your smartphone via bluetooth. This device is very simple, juste read a smal set of bytes coming from the smart phone and store it in register or in Ram.

 

On the smart phone, you can develop an Application that scan a card, read a code bar or what ever you can imagine , then once read , it simply send via bluetooth an identifiant code in the shap of set of byte.

 

So then on the colecovision, the module catch the bytes sequence , store it temporary. Then the program on the cartridge when it need , read the data and can react on it .

 

The good thing with that approach , if we can virtually read all what we can imagine. We could also for instance do Facial recognition or Voice Recognition.

 

Image a Colecovision Game that react to your the sentence you prononce