Re: Beagle Bros and Wonderful disk drive noises

[ard12@eng.cam.ac.uk (A.R. Duell)]

shoppa@alph02.triumf.ca (Tim Shoppa) writes:
>In particular, there was one particular program called "Magic Pack"
>on their "Beagle Bag" disk which had two amazing options:

>1.  "Card Scanner" would direct you to hold a playing card up to a
>specified area on the CRT screen, then when it told you type "RUN"
>and you pressed <Return> it would scan the card and tell you what
>it was.  It was 100% accurate - every time I typed in the "RUN"
>command, it always correctly reported the correct rank and suit
>of card being held up (i.e. "Ace of Spades", "3 of Hearts", etc.).

I'm guessing here, as I've never seen the program in question, but did
this do something like cycle through an internal 4-state counter (for the
suit) and stop when the 'R' was typed, with the state of the counter being
deducable from some non-obvious feature on the screen (colour of some
pixel, something like that) and then do the same thing with a 13 state
counter for the value of the card, stopping when the U is typed.  There's
no way it could work _exactly_ as you described it, although the effect on
a non-informed user could be as you described it. 

>If anybody doubts the ability of a Apple II to do either of the above
>tasks, I invite them to come visit me in Burnaby, BC, and I will
>demonstrate, provided you take me out for a nice meal afterwards.

I can _trivially_ prove that an unmodifed Apple CRT monitor cannot read 
any information off a card held against it. I also agree that a program 
with an effect similar to the one you describe could be written.

>Tim "Control-A" Shoppa. 

--
-tony
ard12@eng.cam.ac.uk
The gates in my computer are AND,OR and NOT, not Bill