mark@cbosgd.UUCP (11/06/83)
We were out looking for a $50 throwaway TI computer the other day, and while the store was sold out, we saw something very interesting from Milton Bradley, called the MBX. It was very impressive, but I don't think you'll want to buy one. The MBX unit plugs into your TI home computer. It provides a speech synthesizer, a speech recognizer (!), a real 360 degree analog joystick, and an 8x8 membrane keypad (a crude touch sensitive tablet, if you will). All this for $90 (at Children's Palace). Sounds pretty good, right? Well, here's the catch. I skimmed through the manual in the store. They do not intend for you to write programs that use it. They want you to buy video game cartridges from Milton Bradley that use it. There was a list of 10 or so such games, none of which the store had. No game comes with it, so for your $90 you can't do anything immediately. They do not document the program interface to anything, nor do they document precisely what the capabilities of the devices are. There are other problems, too. The speech synthesizer is NOT compatible with the one from TI, so you can't use the TI speaking programs with it. The recognizer is, of course, one of the cheapo ones that you have to train - the catch is that, since there is no non-volatile place to save the training info, you have to retrain it every time you power the unit off or change games. (They make a big point about how you don't have to retrain it when you start the same game over.) My impression is that Milton Bradley wants to get into the game cartridge market in a big way. They are tickled pink that suddenly a million TI's are going to be out there in the field. They want you to buy a TI and their MBX unit, then spend a fortune on games for the unit. On the other hand, if somebody on this list is into reverse engineering and can figure out the interface, and find a way to get at it from TI BASIC (this could be a good trick without PEEK or POKE) and posts the way to do it to the net, the MBX could be a good deal. Mark Horton mark@Berkeley.ARPA mark@cbosgd.UUCP