CYGN-B

[laserist]

The scanamp cage in my machine in Washington DC in 1980/81 was vertical opposite from the wall of the enclosure where the laser was mounted. I put an Allen wrench set on top of the cage when we installed the system and didn't find it again until packing back up six months later. Perhaps the reason for moving the cage was Bob Painter's experience in Nashville. They hooked up to the planetarium's cooling water supply, and couldn't figure out why the water was making a hissing noise. It turns out the cooling water was at 90 PSI, and the hissing was the emergency over pressure bypass trying to dump into the drain line. There was also a pressure indicator and power switch right near the original scanamp location. Eventually the over pressure blew the hose off the pressure indicator and hosed the exciter and scanamps. Bob said the prettiest blue flames came out of the top of the projector...

[Greg]

What a terrifying brush with death and disaster. Were the people involved ever able to look back and laugh? I imagine an icy pause in conversation if that ever gets brought up.

I'm going to post photos of what appear to be some related hardware. Apologies if these have been discussed previously in other threads. I don't know what these are, guessing something to do with show creation.

[Greg]

another photo of a console

[ronhip]

My CSX protector caught fire from a bad power supply at the bottom of the rack. After extinguishing the flames and waiting a minute for the adrenalin to calm down, a quick call to Laser Images had a power supply on a plane and I was able to grab it from SFO, install it, and do a couple remaining shows that evening. Those guys in L.A. were good! Luckily, I never had the experience of a wet high-voltage high-current conflagration! That must have been harrowing.

Ron

The scanamp cage in my machine in Washington DC in 1980/81 was vertical opposite from the wall of the enclosure where the laser was mounted. I put an Allen wrench set on top of the cage when we installed the system and didn't find it again until packing back up six months later. Perhaps the reason for moving the cage was Bob Painter's experience in Nashville. They hooked up to the planetarium's cooling water supply, and couldn't figure out why the water was making a hissing noise. It turns out the cooling water was at 90 PSI, and the hissing was the emergency over pressure bypass trying to dump into the drain line. There was also a pressure indicator and power switch right near the original scanamp location. Eventually the over pressure blew the hose off the pressure indicator and hosed the exciter and scanamps. Bob said the prettiest blue flames came out of the top of the projector...

[ronhip]

Although I never had the pleasure or working in L.A., I believe that those were the programming consoles from Studio A at Laser Images. They produced "basic show" data that was placed on the data track on our tapes. So-called "352" data. I'll attach a PDF description of this data below in case you are interested in the data format. This page was taped inside my console for many years as my reference.

Ron

another photo of a console

[Greg]

I guess I'm not a real laserist after all. I've never had to use an extinguisher. I remember one time the yellow channel was lost and the show had to be stopped and cancelled.


Another time, well, given what would never ever happen today... I had been shown how to operate the laser, including start up, tube current adjust or whatever, and using the gas fill pump at 2Hz to reduce pressure, etc. and that was one of the things I was allowed to operate, unsupervised, alone in the star theater between shows. This notwithstanding, in reality, I was scared of the exciter and never touched it in the two years I was there.


So one time I was messing with the oscillators, and the colors drifted so each line was a mix of other colors but without color mod being used. I didn't know if this was nothing or very bad, and I was quite scared. The upshot was that I tasked the planetarium staff to hound down the poor guy who was sick and really needed to rest between shows. Fortunately it was an excursion of tube pressure.


That data sheet is a great insight into and overview of what is going on during a show. I was re-reading Brian's comment a while back that "and on the DOG card an existing 351 value was re-tasked as gain" and considering both how important a DOG gain would be, and the unfortunate way implementing it seriously interfered with workflow.


Also noticing that the DOGN MOTION routine I recently got working seems to need trigger bits which enter through a register labeled ENABLS, and which get consumed by the algorithm, so trigger values must have come continuously from the 351 for the effect to work.

[laserist]

Yes that's the master encoder from Studio A. There were a number of encoders, but only the one in Studio A encoder had the filters and stuff to generate signals from the sound track, etc. The others were just a variation on the theme on the part in the photos with the sliders and switches. The 351 data channel consisted of 20 bytes of data repeated every every 25 milliseconds. Some of the DOG routines were triggered - like popcorn. It allowed you to jump to a new offset on each drum beat.

I wrote the following for a planetarium friend that asked for a blurb Laserium related...

The Right Stuff, the Wrong Stuff, and…

In the lead up to the IMERSA conference in 2014 Ken Scott of Digital Chaotics and I took a teleconference off on a tangent for a minute. Ken said, “I love planetariums, but they don’t love me. I wonder if it’s even possible for a planetarium show to be commercially successful...”

I replied, “It’s already been done, Laserium sold 20,000,000 tickets.

He said, “Then the question is, who’s going to be the next Laserium.

I said, “No, the questions are, what did Laserium do right, what did they do wrong, and how do you update those insights for today’s reality?” The tangent ended there, because even though I’d rebuilt a Laserium era projector and rebooted the original Laserium shows in St. Louis for Laserium’s 40th anniversary, my insights were fully focused on what I’d been doing wrong for today’s reality, not what Laserium did right in 1973.

As the years have gone by I’ve given the right/wrong/update question lots of thought.

It turns out the Laserium business model of a single laserist performing live wasn’t the way Laserium began. In the beginning Ivan (Dryer) and Charlie (McDanald) had 4 friends controlling the x and y axis sliders to control the gain for each image used in the Blue Danube. If they had to pay six laserists to do each show – well, forget commercial success. Charlie once told me that one of the smartest things Laser Images' did was the decision to emulate those other hands. They couldn’t record the relatively high bandwidth imagery, but they could record the low bandwidth voltages the sliders generated. This left the laserist to control imagery, color modulation, joystick, and intensity modulation. It turns out the recording of those ghosts moving the sliders complemented not just the imagery originally intended, but often complimented things nobody had thought of yet. The recorded portion of the show became something akin to the score in an interpretive dance piece. (An interpretive dance score tells the dancers where to move on stage - not how to dance. Some people who have studied music visualizations talk about painting with light, Laserium was more about dancing with light.) The data track adjusted the size and position and other important things that allowed the laserist to focus on the things that made the show a SHOW. So, meta choreography is one the things Laserium did right.

The Mark 4 projector was really not that complex, and its best stuff had to be enabled in data track. It was hard to stray far from the score when you couldn’t use color modulation, chopper, or joystick unless it was enabled. The Mark 6 stripped out those limits, and allowed overrides in other places. It was a much more playable instrument, and more complex. And it kept getting more and more complex over time with controls added here and there with little rhyme or reason. It became more and more difficult to teach someone how to do shows on the evolving projector. So, a hardwired control panel where presets were impossible was one of the things Laserium did wrong.

Someone once said, “In a successful business half of your marketing budget is wasted. The question is, which half?” After the huge success of the mid 1970’s Laserium’s audience began to shrink. Conventional wisdom held that much of the audience had simply moved on. Laserium experimented with new shows, some new music, and changing shows more often. Still the audience shrank. In 1975 Laserium premiered in St. Louis. Laserium bought some ads on KSHE and did a ticket giveaway, and sold out every show for months. That original show ran for 92 weeks and still regularly sold out on the weekends at the end of its run. Fast forward to 2013, we bought some ads on KSHE and did a ticket give away, and saw 3 tickets from the radio station. Still the audience that responded to other marketing loved the show. So, “half of your marketing budget is wasted…” was another wrong thing, and believing in “conventional wisdom” lead Laserium completely astray.

Planetariums have changed over the years. From the perspective of commercial success they’ve gotten smaller. Fewer seats means fewer tickets. The competition for everyone’s leisure time is much more intense, and doing a great show once is hard. Doing a great show – live - night after night is harder. Doing great shows takes a team, and it appears like the number of players on the team at many planetariums has been approaching one for most of my lifetime, and the planetarium team’s total free hours is approaching zero. The problem with a “golden age” is they’re only visible in the rear view mirror.

[ronhip]

Greg,

I only enclosed the basic 352 data format. I found an additional sheet (attached below) that details additional bit settings for DOG, spiral, and joystick rotation. You may find these of interest too.

Brian,

Thanks for your additional thoughts about the challenges that Laserium (and other laser shows) and planetariums in general face. Very cogent. I never thought we got much bang for the buck with our advertising in later years, but if we stopped doing it, no one would know we were still giving shows. And San Francisco was a VERY expensive advertising market. All in all, Laserium ran for longer than all but a few Broadway shows, so that's nothing to sneeze at.

Ron

I guess I'm not a real laserist after all. I've never had to use an extinguisher. I remember one time the yellow channel was lost and the show had to be stopped and cancelled.


Another time, well, given what would never ever happen today... I had been shown how to operate the laser, including start up, tube current adjust or whatever, and using the gas fill pump at 2Hz to reduce pressure, etc. and that was one of the things I was allowed to operate, unsupervised, alone in the star theater between shows. This notwithstanding, in reality, I was scared of the exciter and never touched it in the two years I was there.


So one time I was messing with the oscillators, and the colors drifted so each line was a mix of other colors but without color mod being used. I didn't know if this was nothing or very bad, and I was quite scared. The upshot was that I tasked the planetarium staff to hound down the poor guy who was sick and really needed to rest between shows. Fortunately it was an excursion of tube pressure.


That data sheet is a great insight into and overview of what is going on during a show. I was re-reading Brian's comment a while back that "and on the DOG card an existing 351 value was re-tasked as gain" and considering both how important a DOG gain would be, and the unfortunate way implementing it seriously interfered with workflow.


Also noticing that the DOGN MOTION routine I recently got working seems to need trigger bits which enter through a register labeled ENABLS, and which get consumed by the algorithm, so trigger values must have come continuously from the 351 for the effect to work.

[laserist]

Luckily, Bob was standing across the empty theater when the fireworks started. I only had one, "Wow - this is going to be an embarrassing way to die!" experience in my years at Laser Images. I did try to cool a can of Coke with a CO2 fire extinguisher in Studio B once upon a time - it didn't work. There's a great TED talk by Ken Robinson who makes a pretty good argument that being willing to fail is at the heart of creativity.

Side note: There were studios A, B, C, & D at Laser Images. Occasionally you'll hear Studio S mentioned - that referred to a bar down the street on the corner of Havenhurst and Vanowen named Sullivan's.

I guess I'm not a real laserist after all. I've never had to use an extinguisher. I remember one time the yellow channel was lost and the show had to be stopped and cancelled.


Another time, well, given what would never ever happen today... I had been shown how to operate the laser, including start up, tube current adjust or whatever, and using the gas fill pump at 2Hz to reduce pressure, etc. and that was one of the things I was allowed to operate, unsupervised, alone in the star theater between shows. This notwithstanding, in reality, I was scared of the exciter and never touched it in the two years I was there.


So one time I was messing with the oscillators, and the colors drifted so each line was a mix of other colors but without color mod being used. I didn't know if this was nothing or very bad, and I was quite scared. The upshot was that I tasked the planetarium staff to hound down the poor guy who was sick and really needed to rest between shows. Fortunately it was an excursion of tube pressure.


That data sheet is a great insight into and overview of what is going on during a show. I was re-reading Brian's comment a while back that "and on the DOG card an existing 351 value was re-tasked as gain" and considering both how important a DOG gain would be, and the unfortunate way implementing it seriously interfered with workflow.


Also noticing that the DOGN MOTION routine I recently got working seems to need trigger bits which enter through a register labeled ENABLS, and which get consumed by the algorithm, so trigger values must have come continuously from the 351 for the effect to work.

[Greg]

Some important new (old) resources related to the DOGN have surfaced recently, and an update is in order.

First, the file 6b-352_DATA-FORMAT 2.pdf posted by Ron includes a catalog, or should I say a... (resisting the cheap joke) of DOGN routines to be sought, should ROM data actually become available. It is of benefit to know what one is looking for. Here are the relevant labels pulled from the file:

SUPERMAN DOGLOIDS
POPCORN
ROUND PONG
STAR WARS DOGLOIDS
TIME DOGLOIDS
PONG
FACE
ILL. OF MOT.
CRYSTAL DOGLOIDS
BROWNIAN

This is the map to the Quest of the DOGLOIDS. As can be seen, four of these have recently been restored to operation on a C64, and the others should be able to be found in the ROM data. Thank you for pulling such a great find from your archives, Ron! I wonder which of these is used in the photo of dogloids you provided earlier in the thread.

Secondly, certain party(s) have made available to me the ROM data. This makes the Quest now likely to end in successful recovery of some or all of the missing dogloids. The one less than optimal point to note is that the Crystal Odyssey ROMs may now be concluded to be unrecoverable. I have the material from several classic shows, and will begin with Starship. The results so far: data obtained from the Starship ROM disassembles into machine language. As said in the ending of that curious c64 game Time Tunnel: Gratulari.