Pete Turnbull wrote:
The Philips ones used in Acorn's Domesday system
(1986) are rather like
that. They have an extra SCSI interface, so the computer can control
the player through that, and the player's video is fed to a genlock card
in the computer so the two video stream can be mixed under computer
control, but the laser video isn't digitised. However, some of the
audio tracks actually hold data that the computer *can* read (captions,
indexing, programs, etc).
*hopefully* I'll have mine at a US VCF next year, assuming they'll let it
through US customs (along with all my other vintage stuff). Very impressive
systems given the timeframe, although the 'virtual reality' UI on the computer
end rather shows its age these days...
I think the Domesday setup was pretty unique in having a SCSI interface - as
the previous poster said, typically such 'interactive' players used RS232 for
control (and I don't believe they were capable of moving data from the disk
across the RS-232 link).
cheers
Jules