My mate's parents owned a slightly fancy chinese restaurant, and lived above it. We used to play Dreamcast up there, beg the cooks to give us spring rolls from the kitchen, and watch customers on the cctv. His parents left him in charge of the bgm playlist (a laptop with itunes... definitely didnt pay for licensing) and he added loads of Aphex Twin to it, which they ended up loving! Good times.

@DJ_InYourFace

5 ай бұрын

I'm guessing more tracks from Selected Ambient Works Vol. II than the Come To Daddy EP ?

@thegrinderman1090

5 ай бұрын

@DJ_InYourFace Yes, mostly, but Windowlicker was definitely on at at some point, haha. They only played the music very quietly so it could pass you by unless you focused on it

@DragonGrafx-16

5 ай бұрын

@@DJ_InYourFace I have a memory of hearing Xtal play inside a Kmart... lol

@ryuStack

5 ай бұрын

Thank you for sharing this memory, it's beautiful!

@georgewhite1972

5 ай бұрын

I'm imagining eating a nice egg fried rice while Come To Daddy or Windowlicker is blasting out of the speakers! 😧

8:32 “Scanning…4250%” Wow, that’s… ambitious 😄

As someone who has worked in a supermarket in late 1990's - early 2000's I confirm that the random order of playing music as well as a larger library of songs to play from are extremely important for the sanity of people working in such jobs. Just imagine that every single day for 10-12 hours straight you'll be hearing the same 3 hours of music on repeat in the same god damn order. I can't stress enough that after a couple of weeks this becomes the soundtrack of your life that haunts you with it's repetiveness and slowly but surely kills your soul in the process. 🤣

@Hans-gb4mv

5 ай бұрын

And then Christmas comes around the corner and the boss puts on his favorite Christmas CD on repeat

@Tim091

5 ай бұрын

I used to work in a Jobcentre and we had muzak playing constantly. Muzak versions of songs that were supposed to have a calming effect on our clients. They certainly didn't have a calming influence on me! At Christmas we had muzak Christmas songs, on a loop, for two weeks. After the first week I told my boss that if they didn't take them off I would probably kill someone. They switched it off!

@teqrevisited

5 ай бұрын

I worked for a well known Swedish furniture retailer and when you called through to speak to another department it always played the same songs in the same order. Maddening!

@GPAnimations

5 ай бұрын

We had CDs that we’d play on loop in the media section of Best Buy in 2005. It had a “DJ” on it who said it was “Best Buy Radio” making it sound like it was a live radio station feed to our customers. I don’t know how many times I got to hear the same songs over and over. Thankfully I only worked there part-time and for a short while. I still can’t listen to Gold Digger by Kanye West to this day because of it…among other reasons. 😅

@SilentHillFetishist

5 ай бұрын

I am forced to hear the same hardstyle, lofi, 1LIVE, WDR4 playlist 9 hours a t work.

Years ago I worked for a company that installed BGM systems. As early as 1999 they were using satellite systems and we mainly installed them in large retail chain stores. It was just a tower PC running custom windows software with a satellite receiver card connected to a dish and a sound card connected to the PA system. Specific chain stores would have custom announcements about sales, current specials, etc interspersed between the music. It really was plug and play and completely automated and once installed, the store staff never had to touch the system.

@williamsquires8010

5 ай бұрын

A more primitive solution was just to have a dedicated satellite radio station and have standard-ish satellite receivers picking it up in store - Sky themselves offered this as a service at one point; ASDA FM and Little Chef Radio were findable if you wanted such a thing through a standard Sky box's 'Other Channels' menu.

@DJSubAir

5 ай бұрын

Mood Music is still doing Satellite Service and IP based devices

@markanderson350

5 ай бұрын

The strangest one was in Toronto and it just used a dedicated phone line connected through a transformer to the sound system, called wired for sound. I think you had to be close to the source that was downtown as well.

@JessicaFEREM

5 ай бұрын

The "running Windows software" is probably the scariest part.

@SeanBZA

5 ай бұрын

@@williamsquires8010 A lot of FM radio stations also offer this, using the SCA channel allocation in the FM baseband, which puts extra audio carriers in the FM transmitter output. Low bandwidth, but good enough to carry a few different store channels along with the regular stereo FM broadcast. Of course a lot of the larger chains went to having their own store channel, some with an actual "live" DJ, and those typically either are sent using a digital satellite receiver that is locked to get that particular multiplex, or distributed via a CDN online.

If I was stuck on a cruise ship and they had one CD playing over and over, I'd probably jump off the ship. Thanks Mat.

@nihonam

5 ай бұрын

Dominika-nika-nika =)

@Alabaster335

5 ай бұрын

One of our local radio stations does exactly that, just plays the same songs on shuffle every day, some sort of Top Hits CD.

@oambrosia

5 ай бұрын

@@Alabaster335 this is pretty common in the US...sadly.

@SeanBZA

5 ай бұрын

@@oambrosia Yes especially with stations that are part of a large group, where they just have a playlist, and the automation simply runs through the list, inserting the "local" ads in, along with all the national ones. The kind of station that you will hear at multiple points on the dial, only difference is the on the hour station ID they have to announce.

@nihonam

5 ай бұрын

​@@Alabaster335 Moscow/SPB radio Maximum (I believe it based on some US license) had this policy. I used to listen it on my first job because our chief listened to it. Hard rotation of latest hits, produces nothing but my hatred to probably not bad music.

This is an 486 based processor, ideal for retro gaming! Your Background Music Player DOES run DOOM!

@nooboard

3 ай бұрын

486 based? It has a x86 architecture, but it is same as based on a 486 than any other later x86 CPU is. ;-)

That little box while sterile on the outside contains contains OCEANS of ingenuity. Over the decades, thousands of man-years have been poured into developing the hardware and the software to the point where you just plug it in and it starts playing.

@fluffycritter

5 ай бұрын

It's not as difficult as you might think. Around 20 years ago I built a little Linux machine out of leftover parts which would just start playing random music off whatever zip disk was inserted in the drive. I put this together for my brother for use in his car (and set it up with a read-only filesystem so that power interruptions wouldn't be a problem), and it was a simple evening project.

@AgentOffice

5 ай бұрын

​@@fluffycritterwho made your silicone

@TheGreatAtario

4 ай бұрын

@@AgentOffice *silicon

I'm surprised it's not running an ARM system-on-chip. That Vortex86 part is an odd one, basically a very fast 486 workalike. It shows up a lot in weird embedded systems running weird legacy software.

@StarkRG

5 ай бұрын

It looks like the DX3 version is more like an i686 since it supports USB2, SATA, PCIE, and DDR3. It's also dual core and I'm not aware of any dual-core 486s.

@twocvbloke

5 ай бұрын

I have a couple small 5.7" touchscreen computers based around the Vortex86 CPU, and they're fun little things, lacking ACPI and having a physical power switch brings up a neat little feature in WindowsXP though, when you shut it down, XP actually gives you that classic message "It is now safe for you to turn off your computer." when it's all done, a nice bit of geeky nostalgia... :D

@6581punk

5 ай бұрын

Consumer products vs something like this are different worlds. The cost of the box doesn't become such an issue as they're not shipping millions. Ease of support and development will be their priority.

@CableWrestler

5 ай бұрын

Give me a shout if you want to sell one. KZread doesn't like links to search Instagram for ThinkingSnap

@3rdalbum

5 ай бұрын

This will be pretty good for someone using old 486-compatible software for industrial machinery.

I worked in a diy store part time in the 70s. The background music system always played faster beat ‘hurry-up’ music in the last 15 minutes or so before closing time. Apparently it encouraged shoppers to make their final purchases and make their way to the checkouts.

@MechaGod

3 ай бұрын

Where I currently work, the music just turns off 10 minutes before closing time. I think it helps set the "We are now closed and you should not be here anymore" vibe

I work in a large chain of small clothing stores. Our BGM system is actually CD-based in some way. Every so often, we're sent a CD that we simply throw into a player to update. It doesn't play *from* the CD, but rather seems to download the music and play on its own.

@Mostlyharmless1985

5 ай бұрын

That sounds so back to front, I mean you can keep literal months of music on an optical disk, why not just have the music on the disk encrypted with a key that your BGM device downloads from the service to unlock?

@SeanBZA

5 ай бұрын

@@Mostlyharmless1985 Because a 700M collection of MP3, compressed at 64k, is a really large number of songs, and with a file containing a playlist the player interprets and uses after the files are copied off, no need to use any bandwidth, plus they save on needing ot have a high bandwidth CDN server for the stores. After all, a $1 CD and $2 for the courier fee to the store, giving the store the ability to play even without Internet, is a big bonus. Especially for smaller stores, where they might, by location, have really poor service otherwise, and keeping the limited bandwidth for POS transactions is more important. Plenty of stores where the POS runs off SIM cards from a carrier, and there is only mobile data available there for some reason or the other.

@aiodensghost8645

5 ай бұрын

​@Mostlyharmless1985 that's probably what it did. I know that's basically the system used for game DLC on the disc (only applicable to 360/PS3 games)

@vordan7111

5 ай бұрын

@@Mostlyharmless1985 Because a CD player has moving parts, making it having much lower MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure)

@Mostlyharmless1985

5 ай бұрын

@@vordan7111that doesn't really track, MTBF for just about every optical drive I've encountered in my lifetime borders on decades. It's a servo motor and a laser diode. It's hardly Edison's talking machine. It also doesn't make sense to send optical discs to subscribers if they download the music to the machine because you should be able to do that with various authentication protocols.

“I made that last one up… it was 6%” almost caused a laughing spit take with my morning coffee. Bravo, Mat 🤣

5% death metal - that would shake costumers a bit up indeed! not bad idea I must say!

@Kanbei11

5 ай бұрын

Would like to hear that in the local supermarket

@meinnase

4 ай бұрын

Splice in like .5% Norwegian Atmospheric Blackened Doom Metal and im game.

I know those things! A few months back I had to help transferring the IT gear for a popular kitchenware chain in Australia to another store. While all I needed to do was their computer system, there was another guy there for the sound system and bits and pieces that fell out of our contract. One of them was this sound system. He needed to buy an adapter so it’d play in their store speakers which was installed years before they moved in.. I hung around and helped the kid cause he was young and had no idea, he came from a world where everything is hdmi or Bluetooth

The bane of all shop workers.

Similar to the Music on Hold systems for phone systems, those used to make you think you were hearing things as they had little speakers in them so if you were working in a server room with one plugged into a phone system you would keep hearing voices faintly in the background, even when the place was empty used to freak a few people out for a while till they got used to them

[5:52] Stepping through the video frames I see that the SD card is mounted as an EXT4 filesystem. This is a linux filesystem. You can probably copy the SD card if you block-level copy it; on linux I would use the "dd" command to do that. Anyway, thank you for your videos, they are always worthwhile!

@jkeelsnc

4 ай бұрын

Ahh yes. Good old disk destroyer. 😂

On a side note for a BGM fail: my place of work played BGM music from a PC BUT when installed, only had a limited number of tracks. These went round in a loop and, eventually, started driving staff potty. Took forever (years) to get any movement on changing the music from IT. Why? Person who knew login details had left the company. Eventually, we had a new system installed. Still centrally controlled (frustratingly) but at least it seems someone knows the login details now! 😂

@backacheache

5 ай бұрын

The flip side of that was a bar that I used to go to in the 90's, it automatically DJ'd the music by controlling two cd jukebox's, the music was always great and appropriate for the time of day, until the day it wasn't...when the staff got the password

Not sure which system my old work used to have but you could tell which manager was on shift by the genre of music they'd switch the system to. If more than one was there they'd keep going back and changing between genres. It was kind of funny hearing it suddenly cut to another song throughout the day. A bit of a musical battle of sorts between my managers.

@jhonwask

5 ай бұрын

Seems like the managers care more about themselves than the people they are supposedly managing, just like where I work.

I worked at Toys "R" Us back around 2001-2005, and their BGM was a cassette tape that ran about 4 hours before repeating. That wasn't too bad. Yes, it got a bit repetitive by the time the next tape arrived; tapes were changed monthly. The Christmas ('04?) tapes arrived at the end of October, to start November 1. Two tapes, swapped weekly, to take us to New Year's. Of course, they lost the second tape immediately.

@Azlehria

5 ай бұрын

I didn't work on BGM for TRU, but when I did service work for them about 10 years ago I once ran across a _previous_ incarnation of that system, possibly from the location's previous life as a Sears. It had been abandoned along with all the other equipment in that wiring closet, locked away in the similarly-abandoned basement, and surrounded by piles upon piles of cassettes with a thick layer of dust on everything. I still regret not taking some of them with me, as the earliest label I remembered was scheduled for July of '81. The tape in the deck was from sometime in '93. It still fascinates me that Wi-Fi installs, which weren't critical line-of-business equipment, were an overnight lock-in; while POS installs, which _are_ critical, had start times as late as 8 AM. Yet we were required to have the store use _only_ the new systems, even if it delayed opening. Still doesn't make sense.

@Mad4400

4 ай бұрын

I remember the supermarket I worked at in the late 90s had dual tape decks and new tapes sent out monthly. Once a tape came in that actually had 3-4 goods songs in a row (o.k. 2 great songs and 2 so-so ones). Anytime I was going past the system office and no one was around to tell me not to, I'd cue up the good songs and cut to them at the end of the current song. On the way back to my department, I'd get a nod of approval from those other workers, who knew it hadn't been 4 hours since hearing those songs.

We had an Imagesound player back when I worked at DW Sports. Everything was delivered by the network connection. We'd periodically get updates but on the whole it was the same mind numbing royalty free music you can still hear in Poundland/B&M/The Range now.

@keithsquawk

5 ай бұрын

My local Tesco plays some great stuff - a few times I've noticed other people (as well) humming along or quietly doing the harmonies on the chorus 😆

@RatzaChewy

5 ай бұрын

@@keithsquawk I'm not surprised. Imagesound also supply the music for McDonald's and their playlists are fantastic - genuinely better than most radio stations. It's all down to how much companies are willing to shell out.

The Vortex86 is a modern 486, so the lack of PAE and x64 extensions is expected. It'll DOS game like a monster, though.

@Pepsiphopia

5 ай бұрын

Was thinking actually. Would it run Doom?

@SeanBZA

5 ай бұрын

@@Pepsiphopia It will, though probably not fast, as the VGA hardware likely is limited in RAM.

@CptJistuce

5 ай бұрын

​@@SeanBZADoom doesn't exactly need a lot of video RAM...

@SeanBZA

5 ай бұрын

@@CptJistuce No, but those boards typically only are going to support at best 1024 by 768 video, and most will only do 640 by 480 generally, so they likely laso only support 8 bit colour as well, because most of the time they are doing CGA emulation.

@DenebTM

5 ай бұрын

​@@SeanBZAtypo? CGA isn't 8-bit colour, and why would it be using that? also, this particular device clearly supports at least 16-bit colour, judging by the way ubuntu looked on it

I think Nobles is possibly the Noble Organisation, formerly a UK operator of amusement/slot machine gambling venues under a varied range of brands. They are now part of Astra Gaming.

I worked at one of the original "theme" restaurants and besides music we played video clips and they were all on a huge (big as a old school jukebox ) Laser disc multi disc player for both the music and video if I remember maybe 50 laser discs and every month we would get new ones to replace the film trailers of upcoming films. The DJ booth also had top of the line CD players with pitch control and 2 Technic 1200 turntables and Urei Mixers. It was an amazing set up for the late 90s

14:12 I couldn’t help but picturing you and the misses lumbering to move the Seeburg while the cat stares bemusedly.

If you can get hand of a "Yehova's Witnesses Phonograph" from around 1940 you should make a review about that: Probably the first vertical record player, fully mechanical (for 78s), but using a paper cone like in a loudspeaker with the needle connected to it, which gives it a very good sound quality. Technically really genius.

Retrotech nerd here. DM&P is what's left of ALi/ULi back in the day (i.e., the 90s), and the Vortex86 chip is... interesting. It's basically a 1st Gen Pentium by way of what's called 'architecture' (the way the chip works) -- but, it doesn't implement a particular instruction ("CMOV", Conditional Move), at the binary/"assembly language" (the actual instructions the chip itself knows) that, while _technically_ optional within the 5x86 spec, in practice is the difference between a 486 CPU and a 586 (Pentium 1) CPU. This effectively makes it, functionally, a 486 that implements a bunch of 586 instructions but isn't really a proper 586 -- sort of like how the NEC V20 and V30, a decade or so earlier, implemented the 80186/80188 instruction set on top of the 8086/8088 set and basically acted as much better 8086/8088 CPUs than the original. The Vortex86 design is actually at least the third generation of this particular CPU design, as well -- its predecessor was the SiS 550, back when Silicon Integrated Systems was even vaguely relevant in the PC world. As far as I can tell, while they still exist, they haven't done anything since 2007, and the last half-decade-or-so up to that point they had moved away from CPUs and chipsets entirely, and were focusing on... touch panel controllers for LCD touchscreens. (Pffft.) For what it's worth, the Vortex86 started as a special variant of the SIS55x series (yes, it was a series), integrating Smart Card and MMC/Memory Stick controllers, which ran at 166MHz and was called the M6217D. DM&P at the time was actually Jan Yin Chan Electronics Co LTD, out of Taiwan... eventually they swallowed up other companies to become DM&P Group. However, the SiS55x design did NOT originate with that company... they actually bought it, along with the rest of the company that created it, when they acquired Rise Technology in 1999. Rise had been formed in 1993, and produced the mP6 CPU, which doesn't appear to be well-documented, but from what information I can find, appears to be an independent implementation of the 5x86 design (i.e., not licensed from Intel, but designed in-house to act identically, outwardly, even though the ground-up design internal to the chip is entirely different). It implements the Pentium MMX version of things, but Rise unfortunately took so long to develop the chip that by the time it was _finally_ released in 1998, the market it was designed for was essentially dead and gone -- the second generation of Pentium-class chips (Pentium II and AMD K7 / early Athlon/Duron/etc) were already out. Despite their best efforts, Rise just couldn't compete in the big leagues, and SiS snapped them up not long after. Systems like this EBox PC are actually kind of sought after in the retrotech community by people who want a relatively-simple-to-set-up-and-run "nostalgia box" for later DOS and pre-XP Windows games. Something like this would run most adventure games from the era (back when they really were a thing) quite well... not sure about something like Quake, but since you can run DOOM on a friggin HP printer as long as it has a screen somewhere, _that_ shouldn't be an issue... basically this is the equivalent of a _seriously_ hopped-up, hot-rodded 486 from about the mid-90s, that can play most games from about five years before and through about five years after, give-or-take. It's usually fairly simple, relatively speaking, to get Windows 98 or 2000 running on one of these, with full hardware support, and only the hardcore purists will care that, for example, Sound Blaster audio is emulated, rather than being an actual hardware implementation -- but, this sort of thing isn't for such folks anyways. Now you know.

Somewhere I used to work they had Lighthouse Family's Ocean Drive album on, for two years straight. That was the best part of twenty years ago and it's only recently I've been able to enjoy their music again.

@DerekLippold

5 ай бұрын

I worked outside Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville and they played the same five Jimmy Buffet song over and over.

Speaking of "Just get a Raspberry Pi", I was long wanting something like Mat's Sony digital music player, but they are not cheap. We did look at a "Brennan B3" but it doesn't connect to the amplifier without a separate DAC, so you'd end up with loads of extra cables and power supplies So end of 2023, I put together a Raspberry Pi, attached DAC on a board (HAT connector), flashed a distro/player called MoOde Audio and added a stick of music. Great fun, now I can not only play though the speakers, but I can get that background music effect throughout the flat, controlled from a web front end I take Matt's point though. Handy as it is, it does not have the delight of a record player the size of his Bob dishwasher doing its thing

@gabest4

5 ай бұрын

Even an SBC is overkill. ESP32 with audio amp and sd reader under $10.

@colinspeirs

5 ай бұрын

@gabest4 Well, it's done now. If I want to do it again then I can look at the ESP32. With this I have a touchscreen UI for anyone else that wants to use it just as a normal appliance, not fart around using the web interface of streaming to VLC or the like (or even a port on a browser) If I am doing that again, I will see if the ESP32 has the fuctionality, with whatever boards it needs, though when I had a quick look, my solution is still cheaper as I did not need to buy a 3D printer to make a case :D

For those who don't get how inexpensive a service like this is for a business... let's just say that the cost of not using a properly licensed service (e.g. your personal playlist in a public store) is a LOT more than most people ever realize.

@NerdyMeathead

5 ай бұрын

You only pay a fine with ASCAP if you have over 4 speakers in your store. If your a big store with lots of speakers this is better than paying their $1400 yearly fee to ASCAP. If they go after you for not paying it can be over 75k or more

@SproutyPottedPlant

5 ай бұрын

It was really cheap for charity shops who had lots of CDs hanging around…well until the head office shopped paying for the music licence!

@andrewensor317

5 ай бұрын

Soulless...I'm glad we are the age we are.

@3rdalbum

5 ай бұрын

You could play public domain / free use music, like (I assume) the KZread Music Library?

@GodmanchesterGoblin

5 ай бұрын

​@@NerdyMeatheadDifferent countries have different rules.

I've worked a bit with the video equivalent of these type of devices, often referred to as "digital signage". They can be nothing more than slide shows without audio, or video with audio presentations as were done with VCRs in the past. At the higher end are ones used for electronic menus at fast food restaurants and such. They're basically a more powerful version of the box demonstrated here, and are closer to a "real" or general purpose computer. They tend to be built to avoid noisy fans, although smaller quiet ones are used, too. Thanks for the video, Mat!

@Azlehria

5 ай бұрын

I'm sure it's changed by now, but the digital signage systems I worked with were bog-standard mITX x86-64, usually Intel CPUs and motherboards, in OnLogic M350 or MC500 cases. The real expense, of course, was the HDBaseT and up-link equipment. $70,000+ rack to connect and distribute from a $500 PC to a bunch of $300 TVs. 😂

@bobblum5973

5 ай бұрын

@@Azlehria I'm sure there were/are both generic PCs in various smaller form factors as well as more specifically designed units being used for digital signage and related purposes. The most recent ones I've seen were just Dell ultra-small FF units being used in an office environment.

A new techmoan video is always more than just "some fun"

Such a cool little device. I find the background music players to be an interesting niche. Using a tiny little system on a chip with hardly any moving parts seems like the ultimate evolution.

@andreasu.3546

5 ай бұрын

Perfection and boringness often go together n tech, unfortunately.

funnily enough, the eBox is a regular off-the-shelf thin client PC, and a rather neat one at that. those BGM players might be worth grabbing one for the hardware alone.

@Techmoan

5 ай бұрын

For roughly the same price a Raspberry Pi 4 seems a lot more capable thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b

@FurbleFawks

5 ай бұрын

​@@Techmoan Years ago, these mini pcs were used for robotics projects before the raspberry pi even existed. We used them in university. I've still got one, made by ebox.

Your videos are ALWAYS fun. Thanks Mat.

3:37… ahhhh, background music systems and “All I Wanna Do” go hand in hand. 🤝

Nobles is a chain of Amusment Arcades (fruit machines) I believe.

I was installing the server rack (Refrigerator sized computer) for a brand new store opening up. As part of that was included a background music player. Young people bringing in the merchandise were having a bit of an argument about the existence of a song; The Hokey Pokey. I said that it was an actual song and I'll play it for you. I pulled it up, patched it and a microphone (from the mic port on the device) into the public address system. Announcing throughout the entire store about the argument in the back and by special request, We shall be pleased to hear; The Hokey Pokey.

I'd be super interested to see an image dump of the SD card, just to see what sorts of player engine it uses and how easy it might be to decrypt that data partition. I'm guessing that the encryption in place isn't all that secure, especially since the device needs to be able to decrypt it in some way. I wouldn't be surprised if the decryption key is just stored in the fstab.

@Vednier

4 ай бұрын

But is there any encryption at all? At boot time second partition is just ext3 fs. It maybe corrupted and thus refusing to mount. EXT3 does not support full fs encryption, its usually done by block device mapper like LUKS. I doubt service owner bothered to modify ext3 drivers to support any sort of encryption considering how lousy their device is - you can see its loads XFS, NFS, wireless drivers.. Its Slitaz with minimal modifications. I would like how data partition is mount in fstab too, since system partition mounts just fine.

That's what your channel taught us: the beauty of 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 music. I agree on what you said at the end.

Not enough death metal ! Hilarious. Thanks Mat for making these videos so entertaining.

There's still one thing I'm dying to know, can it run Doom?

@nhansgoofyvideos7581

5 ай бұрын

I think yes, there has been Vortex86 build on the internet before.

@moo4983

5 ай бұрын

Can confirm, I own one of those eBox machines!

@aritakalo8011

5 ай бұрын

​​@@nhansgoofyvideos7581 one could anyway just download the freedoom engine source codes and build a working binary on the device itself.

@andypyne

5 ай бұрын

5:45 - 1ghz CPU and 960mb RAM - should be able to handle it with ease. A few seconds later you see it has a SliTaz Linux Kernel - would be trivial for someome in the know* to get a Linux port of Doom on it 😁 *not me! 😂

@RadeonVega64

5 ай бұрын

​@@moo4983really?

Nice recap, I loved the added bits from the previous version, it explains quite a lot of its overall funcionality and quirks, unfortunately it's quite limited even for a MicroPC

Remember seeing one of these advertising on KZread they said it was the way to go clear work area small foot print etc also the holes are for small bolts so it can be attached to back of monitor's

I worked in a hotel that played Stars by Simply Red and only that. Drove me half daft.

That just about sums up most modern tech in general

The store I work at in the US has a player from a company called Mood music. the music tracks are loaded off a CD. we get update discs every so often.

Love that Seeburg machine you have! Good lil video that, Matt. Thanks, Lee

I wondered when you were going to cover these, we use them in work across the stores and have dozens of old ones sat on the shelf. They would be great for 90s retro gaming boxes. The BIOS on the ones I've messed with haven't been locked.

@NaoPb

5 ай бұрын

Are you looking to sell one? I might be interested.

@adamwheeldon

4 ай бұрын

try 456789 as a bios password - Thank me later

Ha! I have one of those old boxes. I used to work for the company that supplied them and the system before ImageSound acquired it a few years ago. We also provided a version of the system which was essentially just two fairly decent speakers with an SD card mp3 player in the back. We provided a way for people to sync-up their playlists onto the card since the speakers weren't online. Sometimes we even just posted freshly synced SD cards to the premises! Old school!

Great video but it's still weird to hear techmoan saying words like ddr3 and 1GHZ Intel something or other. I like words like gears, sprockets and "bits and bobs" more hahaha

Just love this channel! 👍👍

I just love Seeburg. Such a beautiful piece of equipment. That was the video that made me a Techmoan fan.

Really interesting to see the evolution between this version of the video and the first one. I actually enjoyed the first one, but this is so much better!

We have a Stingray box at my store and it we get streamed the same hundred or so songs every day. It turns into a form of psychological torture to keep hearing the same songs every day. I guess they subscribe to 'play it until you hate it' mantra. It's honestly baffling that it works like this, because it is a streaming service. Maybe my company is too cheap to pay for more music, which seems likely. It does have a line in that overrides it, and you can plug a phone or an MP3 player into it, and when I worked over nights, that's what I'd do. You can only hear 'Jump' by Chris Cross so many times, before you never want to hear it again.

@SUPRAMIKE18

5 ай бұрын

A Papa Johns in my neighborhood had a similar device, but for some reason it wasn't password protected, one of the employees one day replaced the playlist of songs with a 10hr loop of the Spiderman Pizza music 😂😂😂

@rschroev

5 ай бұрын

Being forced to hear "Kris Kross'll make ya (jump, jump)" multiple times a day should be grounds to sue for torture (if it already isn't).

@Code7Unltd

5 ай бұрын

@@SUPRAMIKE18 If I flip the pizzas, Aziz will flip out.

Awesome video Techmoan; what an incredible little device! I love low-end computers; I bet you could make an awesome photo-frame with one of these!

Thanks for the update, very interesting!

Lovely video as usual ❤ Greetings from Copenhagen 🇩🇰

We have this system where I work and it changes the genre, tempo and style of music throughout the day.

We use one of these at work. They send a USB stick with music on it now and then.

NOBELS was a chain of Amusement Arcades. It was taken over or merged with another chain and renamed about 5 or more years ago.

It's always interesting to see how devices have evolved over the years.

Prior to my retirement I listened to the web site you referred to in your Seeburg video. I quite enjoyed it.

Happy New Year to you

The world is changed since I was young, those autochanging cassetteplayers was the best at that moment.

Thanks for sharing.

It is also interesting to see the modern things and solutions!😀

Short or long videos, doesn’t matter. Seeing you in the morning with breakfast is a great start to the weekend 👍🏼

Cold as this piece of tech may be, this video was a really nice way to round out the exploration into the different background music systems you've reviewed in the past. Gives some nice context, and additional appreciation of the clever techniques the older systems had to come up with for continuous play.

There is a company called Noble's Amusements UK, who have next to no Internet presence, who own a handful of attractions and loads of amusement arcades and suchlike around the UK. They owned the Brighton Palace Pier for a while. It may have been bound originally for one of their sites.

I deal with Image sound a lot and have to say from the back office to the installation engineers a great company 👍🏻

You could install a 32-bit version of Batocera or Retropie and slap a buncha video games from the '80s and early '90s to make a small game console. Wouldn't be as good as using a Raspberry Pi or whatever, but it would be fine for old 8 and 16 bit systems if you just happened to have one laying around or could get it for cut down price. As for the BIOS, removing the battery for a few hours would likely do it.

@CableWrestler

5 ай бұрын

I reset the bios on mine by shorting some jumpers on the PCB for a few seconds.

I thought 2 months of Christmas songs on repeat on the radio was bad, but a single CD on repeat? Wow.

Brilliant. Great video.

my guess: the mothership disables communication/connection if the account is not active...seems like it has to maintain a connection of some sort to monitor how many times the songs are played (for royalties tracking) but it was trying to get the IP address from DHCP but seems like the networking for the EBOX is not configured correctly. Probably requires an manual initial setup to get it going, not just plug n play.

I will never not love the tape that goes "weee!"

@rommee

5 ай бұрын

Yeah, I remember the thumbnail for it too! 😂

Nice close-up shots of the PCB!

I did something like that for a jukebox for my desk at work for while. We used a Muzak system for the waiting rooms and hallways that got its playback from FM subcarriers. Anyway, as always thanks for sharing this!

The company I work for sells two devices, one is a network enabled background music player and the other is a Music on Hold device. the MoH just uses MP3s on a regular USB memory stick

Thanks for this! I detect a slight hesitancy to embrace the tech, but do really appreciate seeing your take on something different even if it’s newfandangled and doesn’t break one’s back lifting it… 😊

When I got my first private sector job, the BGM was a local classical music FM radio station; I'm sure there were (and possibly still are) quite a few businesses that use this model. Today, you could easily build a BGM client with a Pi Zero and a small touchscreen...or even a basic bitch Android phone with any music player of choice.

Interesting, it's running a vortex86, which is a 32bit x86 SoC. It's not very common to see it out in the wild outside early 00's ATMs

I don't know what it is exactly but i keep enjoying your content quite a lot. Thank you for another interesting Video.

Every place with one in Canada, it's a box with like 5 preset stations that play pretty much the same music.

We the same company at work and it's pretty good. I can't remember ever hearing the same song twice in the same day and the repeats I can recall have been days apart. I also like how they play a few songs from one genre then move to another. They even do that during Christmas so with the exception of Christmas Eve (and even then I don't recall hearing a repeat) there was never more than a few songs in a row. (I love Christmas music but I loathe hearing the same 20 songs everywhere I go!)

My place of work still uses analog based receivers for their BGM, tuned to a publicly available FM signal at all their nearly 104 locations. There's literally nothing stopping anyone from walking in with a fairly decent FM transmitter and overriding the signal. XD

i used to work in the coop.. a big store in scotland ... they had the same bunch of 15 tracks... played all the time.......... grrrrr handy for shift work .. and you knew the times spent doing a certain task

Yeah, I agree. That Seeburg is an absolutely beautiful piece of equipment.

Interesting video! It's tech you take for granted when you go to stores and restaurants

5:52 It says "EXT4-fs (sda1): mounting ext3 file system using the ext4 subsystem". So you couldn't read the card because it uses ext3, something neither macOS nor Windows supports out of the box. You can use third party software like Paragon extFS which is available for both Windows and Mac. Or just boot into Linux as you did.

@chrisbowser

5 ай бұрын

100% I was about to say it was probably a Linux format no license costs

You are building a great tech history site and gear. Cheers...

I totally had some fun looking at this, thank you. It was a nice bookend to the background music system series. I hope we aren’t done though. There has to be a few left in the middle somewhere? I really would love to see you get one of those airline ones running. I know the connectors wouldn’t look out of place on the Apollo command module but still…it’d be an epic accomplishment!

I started with Muzak when all we had was the SCA broadcast. The year after I started they introduced the FM1 program. Then satellite and now internet.

early 2000's Muzak would send out MP3 CD-ROM's (they'd make it seem unobvious and proprietary, but I'm not sure if they particularly were.) some of the more interesting genre collections were actually quite good surprisingly...!!

we have one of those in co-op i work in, i believe it also plays the advertising videos on the in store screens too, as well as co op radio

Great video, Mat...👍

This Chinese restaurant I go to has an old iPhone wedged out of the way next to the cash register. It plays some sort of Buddhist choir chant on a loop (shows the words on the screen with karaoke-style color-wipe effect as well), and the loop can't be more than 30 seconds long. It's not all that quiet, either - not that hard to hear, at least partly, even if you're not right next to the register. It is never turned off, that I've seen. Even when the lady at the counter is watching some show on a tablet or whatever, that chant goes on. I can't fathom how the couple that owns and runs the place don't both go insane.

Thank you for that interessting video.

That app likely requires some kind of talking back to the mothership. Subscription services like these often maintain centralized servers that receive commands and relay them to the appliances. It's a much longer route than pure intranet, but it keeps the customer locked in to the ecosystem.

In the 70s Sat morning wake up was for cartoons. Now it’s Techmoan.

Cool device. I've actually set up a very similar "radio station" system for my family to use, with a random selection of a couple of thousand tracks, all ripped from my CD collection. Great sound, one button operation, and it won't become obsolete when Spotify et al. change their APIs.

@JPX64Channel

3 ай бұрын

I would like to do something similar, can you give me more details about how did you do it.