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Thread: CYGN-B

  1. #41
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    Greg, I'm in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring that people prove they're interesting before they introduce themselves. Since you've soared over that hurdle, who are you?
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  2. #42
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    Hahaha, agreed. Pleased and honored to meet you Brian. You asked who I am, but who I was perhaps is more relevant. In 1981 I was an 11 year old who knew every fact about lasers I had been able to collect, and perhaps more importantly, was very good at touching only exactly what I was told I could touch, even when unsupervised, and not breaking anything.

    These reasons contributed to my striking a friendship with a young laserist performing at the McLaughlin at the time. I was allowed to hang around between shows on weekends for about a year, and eventually was allowed to explore certain parts of the console including the A and D oscillator banks. When I brought a cassette player in and performed a descent version of Odyssey without the data, I was allowed to learn some of the numbers with the data. Rocky Mountain Way was one of my favorites to perform. (I have a version of this I could post with most of the original choreography.)

    It all ended (but my friendship with the laserist, with whom I'm still in contact) when Laserium closed in that city, and AVI took over. Their shows were awful compared to what I had been used to. No clever abstracts, no lumia, and no subtlety.

    The one thing I found disconcerting was my inability to understand how the digital oscillators actually worked. I could dial in the presets, but when I began a systematic exploration of their functionality by reducing all gains to zero, I was disturbed by the fact that increasing the AM gain brought up a blocky looking cycloid that was somehow related to a different oscillator. There was clearly something complex and interesting going on here.

    Making the rest of the story as short as possible, I began programming cyc (the CYGN-B emulator) in the mid 1990's specifically as a way to probe and re-discover the enigmatic functionality of am/fm cycloids.

    I worked in tech and IT for quite a while, but these days I have letters after my name, and work as a teacher in licensed early learning programs (also known as childcare.) It's loads of fun constantly performing music, puppets, stories, science demos, and occasionally my laser show which I call Laserock Starship. I'll confess to the appearance of a tear when some 6 year olds got up and danced like the flying fans during a performance of Odyssey.

  3. #43
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    It's a pleasure to meet you Greg. We might have met way back when, I vaguely remember going to Toronto to do something field service related, but for the life of me I don't remember what...
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  4. #44
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    I have a busy week ahead, but I expect to get the tapes shipped to you this Saturday.

  5. #45
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    Default Love Cats

    Quote Originally Posted by polishedball View Post
    Any idea if Lumalaser will sell individual tracks or who to contact? I have not the Love Cats track in my collection and my girls would love it as they are hung up on cats.
    Polishedball,

    Maybe I misinterpreted your request. Though I don't have the data track, I do have a video. I played around a bit with ffmpeg to up the saturation, but it's still fairly low quality SD video. HD didn't exist yet. Oh well, it's documentation of some sort.

    Pick up the video here (I couldn't get it to attach to the forum...):

    http://hipschman.myqnapcloud.com:808...i?ssid=0a1D6Iu

    Ron

  6. #46
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    mixedgas is offline Creaky Old Award Winning Bastard Technologist
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    Quote Originally Posted by ronhip View Post
    Polishedball,

    Maybe I misinterpreted your request. Though I don't have the data track, I do have a video. I played around a bit with ffmpeg to up the saturation, but it's still fairly low quality SD video. HD didn't exist yet. Oh well, it's documentation of some sort.

    Pick up the video here (I couldn't get it to attach to the forum...):

    http://hipschman.myqnapcloud.com:808...i?ssid=0a1D6Iu

    Ron

    Greg, PM me with an email that can take attachments. I will not post this one publicly. I believe you have to learn enough about how consoles work and have some proof of musicality before you should have one, but I was a 14-15 year old Laserium groupie once too... This is similar enough when you see it, although not a CY whatever... Before anyone gripes about this statement remember I have feely given much to this artform.


    Steve
    Qui habet Christos, habet Vitam!
    I should have rented the space under my name for advertising.
    When I still could have...

  7. #47
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    Thank you Steve.

  8. #48
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    Anyone know or guess anything about this oddity? I was told by the seller about 15 years ago that it at one time had been the console used at "Magic Mountain". It is functional to some degree. There are X and Y outputs, a couple of analog oscillators that can be switched to presets, a joystick positioner, master gain, and what looks like a third analog oscillator that at some point was re-wired to output a signal for color mod.

    The most curious feature is an image rotator that is controlled by some kind of jog control. There is some noise when this control is operated, but it does in fact perform image rotation.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails MagicMountainConsole.jpg  

    PanelFront.jpg  

    PanelBack.JPG  


  9. #49
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    The jog control is a sin/cosine potentiometer. You should be able to eliminate a lot of noise by buffering the outputs with a couple of opamps configured as voltage followers.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  10. #50
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    The oscillators are likely simple op-amp based quadrature oscillators. The dead one is most likely a broken wire or a blown opamp.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

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