What if Commodore Included a Built in Phylactery to Capture a Soul on the CD32

[grelbfarlk]

What if Commodore included a built in phylactery to capture a soul on the CD32. For anyone that was worried about losing someone in their life they could capture it and bind it to the phylactery on a CD32 and keep it around, indefinitely. This would have many benefits.
1) You could only hear the soul when the CD drive was open and not spinning
2) With the pitiful amount of NVRAM storage space they could keep track of your game's progress
3) It would leave the Expansion port open for a TF or an SX-32 or the MPEG module
4) The probe which did the manual part of sucking the soul up as it left a body could plug into the keyboard/aux port and be an additional add-on cable for a ridiculous price (usually rebought in a panic because they couldn't find the original cable).
5) You would buy multiple CD32s for each person you were worried about.

[StevenJGore]

It would never had happened. Commodore management at the time were saying "Read my lipsys, no phylacterys".

[TCD]

Blood and souls for my lord CD32!

[Tigerskunk]

You'd be surprised to hear that there were actually plans for this according to Dave Haynie. But Mehdi Ali, as always, was against it and preferred to spend the money on lame PC clones.

[dreadnought]

I think the more pressing question is whether we could still blame it on the lack of quality ports to Dragon 32 (which, as any fule kno, is what really brought this great machine down).

[AestheticDebris]

Would've made more sense if they'd put it above the CD drive to hold the lid shut. Avoids the need for a can of paint.

[Rochabian]

Yes , we could have transformed a CD32 into a talking funeral urn, a sort of Alexa of the future, too bad

[roondar]

I'm not so sure a Phylactery works well with leaky caps (or worse, a leaky Phylactery!), so perhaps we should be grateful it never happened.

[E-Penguin]

It ran better on octo-core 486 PCs of the time.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

It ran better on octo-core 486 PCs of the time.

Yeah, but you'd get awful interference when you'd run it next to a pet cemetery.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

You'd be surprised to hear that there were actually plans for this according to Dave Haynie. But Mehdi Ali, as always, was against it and preferred to spend the money on lame PC clones.

It's true, looking through old company statements you can find clues all over the place. The plans went back as far as the CDTV, now that would be a killer -er... -unkillable? Feature.

[jizmo]

If CD23 had Phylactery when it was released in late 1992 it could have easily run Second Reality, likely altering the course of history as we know it today.

Second Reality is nothing but a glorified Desert Dream that we – the idea men of internet forums – could have easily converted to Amiga, if it wasn't for those lazy Amiga coders.

[clebin]

Originally Posted by Rochabian

Yes , we could have transformed a CD32 into a talking funeral urn, a sort of Alexa of the future, too bad

It’s your Auntie Nelly here. Does this thing play Doom?

[grelbfarlk]

It's both worse and better than we all thought. Some aspiring acolyte sent me this image of the Rev 0 CD32 motherboard, "Spellbound!" I noticed a couple other anomalies with this particular motherboard revision.

[E-Penguin]

Fake news. RCA connectors don't exist.

[BSzili]

Finally an interesting "what if" thread!

[Bren McGuire]

finally the amiga what if fan fiction has hit next level good job

i for one would kill to capture a soul in my cd32 maybe if commodore had lasted 73.2 seconds more this could be a reality

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

What if Commodore included a built in phylactery to capture a soul on the CD32. For anyone that was worried about losing someone in their life they could capture it and bind it to the phylactery on a CD32 and keep it around, indefinitely. This would have many benefits.
1) You could only hear the soul when the CD drive was open and not spinning
2) With the pitiful amount of NVRAM storage space they could keep track of your game's progress
3) It would leave the Expansion port open for a TF or an SX-32 or the MPEG module
4) The probe which did the manual part of sucking the soul up as it left a body could plug into the keyboard/aux port and be an additional add-on cable for a ridiculous price (usually rebought in a panic because they couldn't find the original cable).
5) You would buy multiple CD32s for each person you were worried about.

[alkis21]

Can someone explain this thread to me? I Googled phylactery and got even more confused!

[clebin]

Originally Posted by BSzili

Finally an interesting "what if" thread!

Phylactery will get you nowhere.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by alkis21

Can someone explain this thread to me? I Googled phylactery and got even more confused!

We were just thinking that since Commodore didn't include any psychomagnotheric energy source on the CD32 or any way to collect it from the ambient environment, we can assume the phylactery would need to be powered by 5V so when it was turned off the soul contained in the phylactery couldn't have any interface to the custom chipset.

With just a basic magnesium-tungsten alloy frame and the motherboard cold riveted to the case with selenium cores, they'd have been able to avoid a lot of the extra hardware needed to keep the cost down.

It's kind of like wanting the benefits of a mummy napkin but catching a case of sphinx pox later and blaming the pharaoh you nicked it from.