Weird Robot sort of Mod

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Weird Robot sort of Mod

I remember reading about the commodore PET and how you can make a simple program that will make its cassette drive start spinning really fast and actually start on fire. The interesting part is how you can order it to make the drive spin however you want.

I'm not sure if you can make a macintosh do something similar as easily (you'd probably have to program it in assembly), but if you could get the motors to spin, perhaps with the optical driver, or floppy, but you could somehow connect those motors to wheels or arms and make a robot of some sort. And your old LC could run around the house and talk to you through macintalk!

Tell me if this is a dumb idea.

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Re: Weird Robot sort of Mod

I remember reading about the commodore PET and how you can make a simple program that will make its cassette drive start spinning really fast and actually start on fire.

I'd love to know where you read that.

The well-known (among computer history geeks) "Killer Poke" for Commodore PETs actually involved pushing a bad value into a register on the video circutry, causing it to overdrive the monitor and potentially damage the analog circuitry. It has positively nothing to do with the tape drive, at all.

http://www.6502.org/users/andre/petindex/local/petfaq.html

Oh, here, a little googling. Is this it?:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=191

Uhm, hm. At worst, you'll damage the relay. And of course flipping the on-off switch on a motor would, at most, cause it to spin *slower* then its normal speed, not faster. (Think about it.) There *is* no analog speed control.

--Peace

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