Making a potato livecam with the Commodore 128 VDC and ComputerEyes
Another great post from Cameron Kaiser up on his Old Vintage Computing Research blog. This super thorough post details a retro computing project that used ComputerEyes and the Commodore 128 VDC.
If we’re going to make the little old 8-bit MOS 6502 into Skynet — because we already know what the Terminator T-800 CPU is — then it’s gonna need to see. How can it exterminate the last remnants of humanity without vision?
And we’ll use something period-correct, too. While our favourite Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 was busy stalking Sarah Connor in 1984, the product it might have (slowly) viewed the world with was already on the market: the Digital Vision ComputerEyes. Check out the little beige camera perched on a stack of disk boxes, attentively surveilling the room at just a few, uh, seconds per frame as displayed on the monitor. Plug in a composite video source, connect it up to your Apple II, Commodore 64 or (in 1985) Atari 8-bit, and wait about six or seven seconds to identify targets — or almost fifty for the highest quality. If Skynet had chosen this option we might never have had Judgment Day.
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