From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Halcyon (console)
Halcyon (console)
The Halcyon was a home video game console released Suffering from a retail price tag that would discour-
in January 1985 by RDI Video Systems. The initial retail age consumers and content that would require several
price for the system was USD$2500, and it featured a laserdiscs to contain, investors and manufacturers saw
laserdisc player and attached computer, each the size of little success in the future of Halcyon. Its few hand-as-
an early-model VCR. Only two games were released for sembled prototypes went into the hands of certain in-
the system before RDI went bankrupt: Thayer’s Quest and vestors and collectors. Well-known names among these
Raiders vs. Chargers, although trailers for several others investors included Merv Griffin, Quinn Martin and Cas-
were created. RDI Video Systems claimed that the sys- sandra Peterson.
tem would be entirely voice-activated, and would have Ironically, Dragon’s Lair was not part of Halcyon’s ini-
an artificial intelligence on par with HAL 9000 from 2001: tial content repertoire. The Secrets of the Lost Woods
A Space Odyssey. footage was used to develop firmware for the unit prior
to Fred Wolf’s production of the Thayer’s Quest animation.
History
Rick Dyer was one of the many fans of the interactive fic-
Technical details
tion game Adventure. He envisioned a game that would
feature illustrations of every scene in this game, the first Hardware
prototype being a roll of printing calculator tape that Halcyon was based around the Z80 microprocessor, with
would be wound forward and backward via microproces- its 64K memory partitioned out to ROM and RAM. A sep-
sor to show illustrations and information drawn on its arate speech recognition computer provided the addi-
surface. tional power needed to recognize human speech. Its
Later this was refined to a slightly different technolo- firmware was proprietary, and its chief communications
gy of a filmstrip projector, which was later synchronized with the Z80 were indications of what word it had rec-
to a tape recording of a narrator reading the text normal- ognized, and what probability of confidence it calculated
ly shown by the game as the player entered each scene. for the match. Other functions this subsystem provided
With the advent of the videodisc player, Dyer realized were non-volatile memory storage, and speech recogni-
he could consolidate onto one medium the audio and vi- tion training.
sual content, which was called The Fantasy Machine. Pre- Video content existed on a special computer-con-
sentations of this device to prospective toy manufactur- trolled CED player provided by RCA. Because of video en-
ers failed. coding and stylus positioning constraints inherent in this
Later it was realized that still images with narration technology, still frames (where action would be suspend-
were insufficient to capture the toy market, so animation ed pending player input) had to be encoded as a repeat
projects began. The first project was titled The Secrets of of 2 or 3 seconds of video. Late in its development, Halcy-
the Lost Woods,[1] which included a section known as the on had to be re-designed to use Laserdisc players because
Dragon’s Lair. NB: Dragon’s Lair animation and production CED units were put out of production by RCA.
was separate from that of The Secrets of the Lost Woods. Communications with CED players were serial. Com-
The lair existed only as a yet-to-be-finished "node" of the munications with Laserdisc players were via infrared LED
woods. attached via suction cup.
Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace supplied enough profits Speech synthesis was produced using a licensed text-
and credibility for RDI Video Systems to progress toward to-speech algorithm included as part of the base Halcyon
realizing their technology into a home entertainment Operating System, including a special English vocabulary
and edutainment format. which would correctly pronounce hundreds of proper
To help control the consumer price of this unit, it names. The phonetic output of this algorithm was fed in-
was first designed around the RCA Capacitance Electronic to a Votrax chip.
Disc player. When RCA canceled the production of these
players prior to the completion of the Halcyon project, Software
it was re-designed to use a laserdisc. One of the biggest Firmware unique to the game being played existed as a
obstacles in this re-design (after its significantly higher removable ROM cartridge containing 16K memory, in-
cost) was the short 30-minute-per-side capacity of Con- cluding the entire game node layout, vocabulary of the
stant Angular Velocity or random access laserdiscs. game (both for the speech synthesizer and speech recog-
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Halcyon (console)
nizer), inventory data (both for gameplay as well as video required to be included in the animation, often resulting
still frames depicting items), and certain executable data in speaking characters having their mouths obscured or
sections to assist in the processing of game flow. speaking with their backs turned.
Save for the words "Yes" and "No," Halcyon required A scene with an item used or removed would have
each player to train it to recognize their voice. The words separate animation and graphics, allowing for 2 addition-
"Yes" and "No" existed as 4 samples of human voices pre- al audio tracks, again without lip sync.
loaded into memory. Two were female samples, and two Audio tracks were encoded into the left and right
were male. Each voice was selected for their unique pitch channels of a stereo encoding, therefore only monaural
and timbre properties. These 4 gave a high probability audio would be played from any given instance of a
match for Halcyon to recognize from any given English scene.
speaker. Almost all scenes in a game would have some in-
Speech recognition was discontiguous, meaning the formation revealed that would contribute to solving the
player had only a few seconds to speak into a headset puzzle of obtaining the final goal of the game. Since Hal-
when prompted. This headset was equipped with a noise- cyon needed to keep track of first versus subsequent vis-
canceling microphone to help isolate speech from any its, a count of visits (up to a maximum of 15) would be
other sounds. Speech samples would be compared used to trigger its speech synthesized hints and com-
against allowed responses, and a match along with prob- ments. One example from Thayer’s Quest would be the
ability of accuracy would be sent to the Halcyon main direct instruction to take the right door when the wrong
processor. door (leading to instant death) was chosen more than
To acknowledge voice commands, Halcyon would re- once.
iterate what it believed it "heard" the player say. This To break up the monotony of robotic speech, Halcyon
sometimes resulted in incorrect actions taken, especially was given prompt and response phrases that had mark-
if the player had a significantly different inflection or ers that would include interchangeable words and phras-
spoke something different from the choices expected. es, along with the Player’s name which it would include
Probability ranking could trigger Halcyon to ask the occasionally. "Enter your name on my keyboard" and
player to repeat their choice when it received a poor "Please spell your name" would be two examples of
match to all expected responses. Mis-recognitions were phrases it would use to prompt the player.
chiefly the result of a sample of speech given sufficient Halcyon’s game authoring method would easily ac-
probability to match one of the anticipated words or commodate playing Dragon’s Lair, except for the re-
phrases. straint that speech recognition would take too long to
Halcyon was intended to have a voice much like the process each move before the time allowed would expire,
Hal 9000, but memory constraints prohibited the use of limiting it to keyboard-only use. This game’s inclusion
tailored speech parameters for the Votrax synthesizer was not considered for this reason as well as license re-
that was built into the console. The compromise was to strictions.
use a licensed text-to-speech algorithm that had several Each player’s game record was represented in non-
built-in rules for pronouncing English text properly. For volatile memory as the set of items they had in their in-
speech the console made that the algorithm did not pro- ventory, the visit counters of all possible nodes in the
nounce acceptably, special spelling was incorporated in- game (unvisited nodes having a count of zero), the scene
to the source text of words and phrases to correct for toggle information (item used/taken/etc.), applicable
these problems. This would not correct the words (user timers (real-time events would suspend when games
names, primarily) that were typed into the Halcyon when were saved), and their trained speech sampled data. To
a player first began playing the game. resume play, all one had to do was speak their name
A video game would follow a general design of when asked to do so by Halcyon.
"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
References
interrupted if its associated event did not occur, were al- 1. ^ http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.1/articles/
so part of the game’s dynamic. dyer.html Interview with Rick Dyer
Scenes existed as 2 or more scripts: One for the "nor-
mal" or first encounter with the scene; one for subse-
quent visits; optionally one or two for where certain ac-
External links
tions required the scene animation or graphics to devi- • Dragon’s Lair Project entry on the Halcyon
ate, usually where an item has been removed or used. • Halcyon Flyer
A scene had to be identical in animation and graphics • The Computer Chronicles episode featuring Halcyon
between its normal and subsequent visit, differing only
in the audio track used. For this reason, lip sync was not
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Halcyon (console)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Halcyon_(console)&oldid=467760041"
Categories:
• Laserdisc
• Third-generation video game consoles
• 1985 introductions
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