Halcyon (console)
Encyclopedia
The Halcyon was a home video game console
Video game console
A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
released in January of 1985 by RDI Video Systems
RDI Video Systems
RDI Video Systems was a video game company founded by Rick Dyer originally as "Advanced Microcomputer Systems", and was well known for its Laserdisc video games, beginning with the immensely popular Dragon's Lair...
. The initial retail price for the system was USD
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
$2500, and it featured a laserdisc
Laserdisc
LaserDisc was a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially licensed, sold, and marketed as MCA DiscoVision in North America in 1978, the technology was previously referred to interally as Optical Videodisc System, Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Optical...
player and attached computer, each the size of an early-model VCR. Only two games were released for the system before RDI went bankrupt: Thayer's Quest
Thayer's Quest
Thayer's Quest was a laserdisc adventure game released by RDI Video Systems in 1984 as a game for their Halcyon console, computer and laserdisc player, but was later released as a conversion kit for Dragon's Lair arcade consoles when the Halcyon's high price tag damaged its appeal.-Plot:The player...
and Raiders vs. Chargers, although trailers for several others were created. RDI Video Systems claimed that the system would be entirely voice-activated, and would have an artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
on par with HAL 9000
HAL 9000
HAL 9000 is the antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction Space Odyssey saga. HAL is an artificial intelligence that interacts with the astronaut crew of the Discovery One spacecraft, usually represented as a red television-camera eye found throughout the ship...
from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
History
Rick Dyer was one of the many fans of the interactive fiction gameInteractive fiction
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...
Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...
. He envisioned a game that would feature illustrations of every scene in this game, the first prototype being a roll of printing calculator
Calculator
An electronic calculator is a small, portable, usually inexpensive electronic device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic. Modern calculators are more portable than most computers, though most PDAs are comparable in size to handheld calculators.The first solid-state electronic...
tape that would be wound forward and backward via microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
to show illustrations and information drawn on its surface.
Later this was refined to a slightly different technology of a filmstrip projector
Filmstrip
The filmstrip was a common form of still image instructional multimedia, once commonly used by educators in primary and secondary schools , now overtaken by newer and increasingly lower-cost full-motion videocassettes and DVDs...
, which was later synchronized to a tape recording of a narrator reading the text normally shown by the game as the player entered each scene.
With the advent of the videodisc player, Dyer realized he could consolidate onto one medium the audio and visual content, which was called The Fantasy Machine. Presentations of this device to prospective toy manufacturers failed.
Later it was realized that still images with narration were insufficient to capture the toy market, so animation projects began. The first project was titled The Secrets of the Lost Woods, which included a section known as the Dragon's Lair
Dragon's Lair
Dragon's Lair is a laserdisc video game published by Cinematronics in 1983. It featured animation created by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth....
. NB: Dragon's Lair animation and production was separate from that of The Secrets of the Lost Woods. The lair existed only as a yet-to-be-finished "node" of the woods.
Dragon's Lair and Space Ace
Space Ace
Space Ace is a laserdisc video game produced by Don Bluth Studios, Cinematronics, and Advanced Microcomputer Systems...
supplied enough profits and credibility for RDI Video Systems to progress toward realizing their technology into a home entertainment and edutainment
Edutainment
Edutainment is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse.-Overview:...
format.
To help control the consumer price of this unit, it was first designed around the RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
Capacitance Electronic Disc player. When RCA canceled the production of these players prior to the completion of the Halcyon project, it was re-designed to use a laserdisc
Laserdisc
LaserDisc was a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially licensed, sold, and marketed as MCA DiscoVision in North America in 1978, the technology was previously referred to interally as Optical Videodisc System, Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Optical...
. One of the biggest obstacles in this re-design (after its significantly higher cost) was the short 30-minute-per-side capacity of Constant Angular Velocity
Constant angular velocity
In optical storage, constant angular velocity is a qualifier for the rated speed of an optical disc drive, and may also be applied to the writing speed of recordable discs...
or random access
Random access
In computer science, random access is the ability to access an element at an arbitrary position in a sequence in equal time, independent of sequence size. The position is arbitrary in the sense that it is unpredictable, thus the use of the term "random" in "random access"...
laserdiscs.
Suffering from a retail price tag that would discourage consumers and content that would require several laserdiscs to contain, investors and manufacturers saw little success in the future of Halcyon. Its few hand-assembled prototypes went into the hands of certain investors and collectors. Well-known names among these investors included Merv Griffin
Merv Griffin
Mervyn Edward "Merv" Griffin, Jr. was an American television host, musician, actor, and media mogul. He began his career as a radio and big band singer who went on to appear in movies and on Broadway. From 1965 to 1986 Griffin hosted his own talk show, The Merv Griffin Show on Group W Broadcasting...
, Quinn Martin
Quinn Martin
Quinn Martin was one of the most successful American television producers. He had at least one television series running in prime time for 21 straight years , an industry record.-Early life:...
and Cassandra Peterson
Cassandra Peterson
Cassandra Peterson is an American actress best known for her on-screen horror hostess character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She gained fame on Los Angeles television station KHJ wearing a black, gothic, cleavage-enhancing gown as host of Movie Macabre, a weekly horror movie presentation...
.
Ironically, Dragon's Lair was not part of Halcyon's initial content repertoire. The Secrets of the Lost Woods footage was used to develop firmware
Firmware
In electronic systems and computing, firmware is a term often used to denote the fixed, usually rather small, programs and/or data structures that internally control various electronic devices...
for the unit prior to Fred Wolf's
Fred Wolf
Fred Wolf is an American animator. His works include the 1967 short subject The Box, for which he won an Academy Award; television specials such as The Point! and Free to Be... You and Me, and television series such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, James Bond Jr., and Sarah Ferguson's Budgie the...
production of the Thayer's Quest animation.
Hardware
Halcyon was based around the Z80 microprocessor, with its 64K memory partitioned out to ROMRead-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
and RAM. A separate speech recognition
Speech recognition
Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...
computer provided the additional power needed to recognize human speech. Its firmware
Firmware
In electronic systems and computing, firmware is a term often used to denote the fixed, usually rather small, programs and/or data structures that internally control various electronic devices...
was proprietary, and its chief communications with the Z80 were indications of what word it had recognized, and what probability of confidence it calculated for the match. Other functions this subsystem provided were non-volatile memory
Non-volatile memory
Non-volatile memory, nonvolatile memory, NVM or non-volatile storage, in the most basic sense, is computer memory that can retain the stored information even when not powered. Examples of non-volatile memory include read-only memory, flash memory, ferroelectric RAM, most types of magnetic computer...
storage, and speech recognition training.
Video content existed on a special computer-controlled CED player provided by RCA. Because of video encoding and stylus positioning constraints inherent in this technology, still frames (where action would be suspended pending player input) had to be encoded as a repeat of 2 or 3 seconds of video. Late in its development, Halcyon had to be re-designed to use Laserdisc players because CED units were put out of production by RCA.
Communications with CED players were serial
Serial communications
In telecommunication and computer science, serial communication is the process of sending data one bit at a time, sequentially, over a communication channel or computer bus. This is in contrast to parallel communication, where several bits are sent as a whole, on a link with several parallel channels...
. Communications with Laserdisc players were via infrared
Infrared
Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, measured from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.74 micrometres , and extending conventionally to 300 µm...
LED
LEd
LEd is a TeX/LaTeX editing software working under Microsoft Windows. It is a freeware product....
attached via suction cup.
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...
was produced using a licensed text-to-speech algorithm included as part of the base Halcyon Operating System, including a special English vocabulary which would correctly pronounce hundreds of proper names. The phonetic output of this algorithm was fed into a Votrax
Votrax
Votrax International, Inc. , or just Votrax, was a speech synthesis company located in the Detroit, Michigan area from 1971 to about 1996 It began as a division of Federal Screw Works from 1971 to 1973...
chip.
Software
Firmware unique to the game being played existed as a removable ROM cartridge containing 16K memory, including the entire game node layout, vocabulary of the game (both for the speech synthesizer and speech recognizer), inventory data (both for gameplay as well as video still frames depicting items), and certain executable data sections to assist in the processing of game flow.Save for the words "Yes" and "No," Halcyon required each player to train it to recognize their voice. The words "Yes" and "No" existed as 4 samples of human voices pre-loaded into memory. Two were female samples, and two were male. Each voice was selected for their unique pitch and timbre properties. These 4 gave a high probability match for Halcyon to recognize from any given English speaker.
Speech recognition was discontiguous, meaning the player had only a few seconds to speak into a headset when prompted. This headset was equipped with a noise-canceling microphone to help isolate speech from any other sounds. Speech samples would be compared against allowed responses, and a match along with probability of accuracy would be sent to the Halcyon main processor.
To acknowledge voice commands, Halcyon would reiterate what it believed it "heard" the player say. This sometimes resulted in incorrect actions taken, especially if the player had a significantly different inflection or spoke something different from the choices expected. Probability ranking could trigger Halcyon to ask the player to repeat their choice when it received a poor match to all expected responses. Mis-recognitions were chiefly the result of a sample of speech given sufficient probability to match one of the anticipated words or phrases.
Halcyon was intended to have a voice much like the Hal 9000, but memory constraints prohibited the use of tailored speech parameters for the Votrax
Votrax
Votrax International, Inc. , or just Votrax, was a speech synthesis company located in the Detroit, Michigan area from 1971 to about 1996 It began as a division of Federal Screw Works from 1971 to 1973...
synthesizer that was built into the console. The compromise was to use a licensed text-to-speech algorithm that had several built-in rules for pronouncing English text properly. For speech the console made that the algorithm did not pronounce acceptably, special spelling was incorporated into the source text of words and phrases to correct for these problems. This would not correct the words (user names, primarily) that were typed into the Halcyon when a player first began playing the game.
A video game would follow a general design of "nodes" which interconnected based upon responses and lack of responses from a player. Certain triggers, such as a real-time constraint under which the game would be interrupted if its associated event did not occur, were also part of the game's dynamic.
Scenes existed as 2 or more scripts: One for the "normal" or first encounter with the scene; one for subsequent visits; optionally one or two for where certain actions required the scene animation or graphics to deviate, usually where an item has been removed or used.
A scene had to be identical in animation and graphics between its normal and subsequent visit, differing only in the audio track used. For this reason, lip sync
Lip sync
Lip sync, lip-sync, lip-synch is a technical term for matching lip movements with sung or spoken vocals...
was not required to be included in the animation, often resulting in speaking characters having their mouths obscured or speaking with their backs turned.
A scene with an item used or removed would have separate animation and graphics, allowing for 2 additional audio tracks, again without lip sync.
Audio tracks were encoded into the left and right channels of a stereo encoding, therefore only monaural
Monaural
Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...
audio would be played from any given instance of a scene.
Almost all scenes in a game would have some information revealed that would contribute to solving the puzzle of obtaining the final goal of the game. Since Halcyon needed to keep track of first versus subsequent visits, a count of visits (up to a maximum of 15) would be used to trigger its speech synthesized hints and comments. One example from Thayer's Quest would be the direct instruction to take the right door when the wrong door (leading to instant death) was chosen more than once.
To break up the monotony of robotic speech, Halcyon was given prompt and response phrases that had markers that would include interchangeable words and phrases, along with the Player's name which it would include occasionally. "Enter your name on my keyboard" and "Please spell your name" would be two examples of phrases it would use to prompt the player.
Halcyon's game authoring method would easily accommodate playing Dragon's Lair, except for the restraint that speech recognition would take too long to process each move before the time allowed would expire, limiting it to keyboard-only use. This game's inclusion was not considered for this reason as well as license restrictions.
Each player's game record was represented in non-volatile memory as the set of items they had in their inventory, the visit counters of all possible nodes in the game (unvisited nodes having a count of zero), the scene toggle information (item used/taken/etc.), applicable timers (real-time events would suspend when games were saved), and their trained speech sampled data. To resume play, all one had to do was speak their name when asked to do so by Halcyon.