Dawson/Combs Family Feud Board - Merry Xmas / Happy New Year

[clemon79]

My guess with the heart is that they had to create special characters to form that in a proto-ASCII art sort of way, or perhaps those were included with the software for the purpose of making designs like that.

Back in the day those ASCII characters were pretty common for graphics purposes. Consider the Commodore keyboards:

[chris319]

I've seen the Switcheroo game from behind and there were no coil springs or solenoids. Instead there was a magnetic "cupboard-door" latch to hold the flap in the unrevealed position. Instead of a solenoid, when a model pressed the button the magnet was disengaged, the flap rotated into the "revealed" position and gravity took care of the rest.

Do I have that about right, Scott?

[chris319]

I was hoping that article would go into more detail about the FF board. I had heard about the Jacquard computer which was later replaced with an IBM PC. I don't know if the Jacquard sent ASCII codes to the character modules or actual dot patterns (less likely). There would have to be a control pulse to tell each character when to go from blank to the character. For some reason "300 baud" sticks in my mind so it may have been a common RS-232 interface. I remember seeing Georgia Purcell typing in the Fast Money responses but am unclear on how the point values were entered and how the answers were covered and revealed when the second player came out.

It makes sense that Ferranti Packard would have constructed the board in Mississauga, Canada and shipped it to L.A. Each character module cost $100 at the time.

RS-232 - there's a blast from the past.

[chris319]

Read about flip-disc displays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-disc_display

[MSTieScott]

Do I have that about right, Scott?

It's been a while since I've had access to Switcheroo's fun bits, but that sounds about right. I do remember that it didn't need electricity to work and that it wasn't difficult to reset the panels.