Undocumented card reader function?

[ThomasF]

Hi Eric,

Yes, that is a pity, would have been a nice document to have along with the other VASMs.

(07-03-2024 03:43 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  I intended to add 82104A support to Nonpareil, but unfortunately never got around to it

My intention is not to emulate the card reader, it is more that I like to understand how the Card Reader ROM works - and improve my own MCode skills ...
To emulate (which I think would be quite easy with the Pico41), one would need an easy way to read the cards somehow - e.g. some kind of card-reader attached to the Pico41 or a PC.

When I did the Wand emulation it was much more obvious - creating a software bar code scanner was easy and made sense - i.e. I can scan any bar code from any scanned document and send it to the 41 with just the Pico41 and a piece of software.

But how could that be done with magnetic cards ... ? Maybe a "magic carpet" could do the trick?
I searched for "Magnetic Field Viewer" and found some "Card Magnet Detector Pattern Display" - but I guess that the resolution is not good enough to see the pattern on these cards.

Update: Maybe this could be a solution?
The resolution seems good enough - but still quite some work (and expensive) to be done for each card ...

With the amount of cards out there it would be a great idea - but I can't visualize a simple solution ...

That is to say apart from just because we can ...

Cheers,
Thomas