4 ms·

I did this with a Philips CD player and a Commodore-64 back in the day, using the system as a "modern" alarm clock which would wake both me as well as the rest

I did this with a Philips CD player and a Commodore-64 back in the day, using the system as a "modern" alarm clock which would wake both me as well as the rest of the house - and probably some neighbours - by blasting out, say, 'Highway to Hell' at the correct moment. This all came about from my curiosity about that "remote control" socket on the back of the thing. I did not know about RC-5 or anything but decided on a whim to send a letter (as in "paper in an envelope", this was before email was a thing for companies like Philips) to Philips inquiring about the correct way to interact with that socket. Lo an behold, they replied by sending me a stack of paper detailing the RC-5 protocol complete with required voltages etc. With that information in hand I made an adapter for the user port on the CBM-64 and a program which bit-banged RC-5 through it. It was quite satisfying to see the thing react to some command typed on a "remote" keyboard, just imagine the possibilities... Well, one of the possibilities it lacked was volume control... which sometimes made the wake-up call quite alarming... That CD player was the first, and also the last one I ever owned. I still have it in a box somewhere but never use it. CDs were too expensive for too long a time which made them an easy prey once it became possible to download music.

dylan604 5y ago
Old skool hacking was so rewarding as a kid as you learned about both hardware and software. Now, I feel like the younger curious minded individuals are primarily software centric. At least with things like Arduino/Pi/etc, you can get back into hardware as well.
- the_third_wave 5y ago
  Single board computers like the Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers like Arduino above all have made this type of hacking far more affordable. While it was possible to use the parallel printer port as a makeshift user port replacement it came with the baggage of an entire desktop or notebook machine taking up space, using power and making noise.
linsomniac 5y ago
That reminds me of my old CD setup: I had 3 of the Sony 200-disc CD changers and a "Slink-e" device to computer control them. I wrote some Python code that would pause shuffle all the tracks on all the discs, and hold two of the devices paused while the third was playing. When it reached the end of the track, it would pause that one, unpause another one, and then seek the newly-paused player to a new song and pause it there. It was really empowering to have this because: I had more CDs than a single player could handle, and it took a quite a long time to change discs, maybe 10-30 seconds. Of course, this was back in the early '90s. By the mid to late '90s I had ripped all my CDs to mp3s and later spent 2 weeks re-ripping them as FLACs. http://www.whanafi.net/Sliinke.html http://www.whanafi.net/Sliinke.html

dylan604 5y ago

Old skool hacking was so rewarding as a kid as you learned about both hardware and software. Now, I feel like the younger curious minded individuals are primarily software centric. At least with things like Arduino/Pi/etc, you can get back into hardware as well.

the_third_wave 5y ago
Single board computers like the Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers like Arduino above all have made this type of hacking far more affordable. While it was possible to use the parallel printer port as a makeshift user port replacement it came with the baggage of an entire desktop or notebook machine taking up space, using power and making noise.

linsomniac 5y ago

That reminds me of my old CD setup: I had 3 of the Sony 200-disc CD changers and a "Slink-e" device to computer control them. I wrote some Python code that would pause shuffle all the tracks on all the discs, and hold two of the devices paused while the third was playing. When it reached the end of the track, it would pause that one, unpause another one, and then seek the newly-paused player to a new song and pause it there. It was really empowering to have this because: I had more CDs than a single player could handle, and it took a quite a long time to change discs, maybe 10-30 seconds. Of course, this was back in the early '90s. By the mid to late '90s I had ripped all my CDs to mp3s and later spent 2 weeks re-ripping them as FLACs. http://www.whanafi.net/Sliinke.html http://www.whanafi.net/Sliinke.html