Wow, nice!

Can you take photos inside and out to show how it was built, and a video showing it working?

I'd really enjoy to see this documented since it has never been documented before.

I've been trying to dig up a patent for this, but haven't had much luck.

The company name is Clyde Industries America Inc. (or Clyde Industries Ltd). The label on the "The Lyte" says "patent pending", but doesn't list a number. I've managed to find photos for a few labels, but none list a patent number.

The trademark entry for "The Lyte" gives an interesting description, but there aren't any patents that seem to match any keywords in the right time frame.

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:ra1lr4.3.1
https://www.trademarkia.com/the-lyte-73643469.html
pasted_image (resized).pngpasted_image (resized).pngpasted_image (resized).pngpasted_image (resized).pngpasted_image (resized).png

I knew it had "lyte" was associated with it, but until now, I thought it was the manufacturer rather than the product name, as per the comment from Joe Kaminkow on IPDB. It's tough to find something named "lyte" without another piece of identifying information. Clyde combined with Lyte was the key.

You would still have to make a vacuform mold for the data east style box, and find some smoked glass to cut to the right shape to fit the box. It looks like the glass is riveted to the case.

There's also what looks like holes on the side (in the laser war flyer), and I'm not sure what those are for.

On IPDB:

The manufacturer flyer shows a trapezoidal backbox topper with a spinning red LED board to create an optical effect. Joe Kaminkow told us that the light itself came in a square black box, approximately 12 by 12 inches, made by a now-defunct company called Lyte. Data East added a custom trapezoidal housing around it for mounting on the backbox using screws. The spinning LED display did not operate in concert with game play. He wasn't sure if it got its power from 12 volts from the output of the sound board or if it had a 110v line cord. Joe said the topper was too expensive and was discontinued during the production run of this game. He guessed about 500 of the earliest machines came with this topper.

So, a few pieces of info in that comment are incorrect at least--the Lyte name, and the number of them made (I keep hearing the number 10 thrown about--not 500).

Also, it seems odd that the device would not be connected to the sound system in some way considering it is a sound visualizer (and that this was the first stereo sound system). I really want to see if @aberdeentp's topper has a cord that would connect to something in the game.

Yeah, that was me. I figured it would be better for a pinhead to lay hands on it to potentially have a shot a documenting and reproducing it. It seems like it could be an interesting project to tackle.

Well, as long as you can grab an unamplified audio signal from somewhere, you should be able to connect it to the lyte's input.

The amplified output to the speakers would probably blow the lyte's board.

If you install the youtube app on your phone, it should make the process fairly straight forward.

Thanks for posting--that looks cool. Never thought I'd see one of those in action.

I'm surprised that it's connected to the amplified output. I wonder if they did anything special inside the unit to account for that.

I'm guessing they discarded the outer wooden box and did their own mount, which would have made the topper shell a bit smaller. Then they probably used a trapezoid-shaped piece of smoked plastic and riveted it to the plastic topper's shell.

I would ignore the flyer and just focus on actual photos of the topper. It's not uncommon for prototype features to appear in the flyers, or for an artist to mock something up. They are promotional materials and not always reflective of what the final version of the game ends up to be.

For one thing, the Lyte does not actually display concentric circles like in the flyer. When it's receiving no audio input, there's only one circle visible.

Maybe--seems like an odd choice and difficult photo to take, though. I would've tried to capture an active waveform. Or maybe it was just painted into the flyer.

You can see it between some songs and at the end of the video.

The sensitivity adjustment didn't matter. The same thing also appeared when there was no audio source plugged into the Lyte. The behavior was present in 3 different units.

You can use a 12v 2a power adapter:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Q2E5IXW/

The original adapter was 800ma, so anything above that is fine. 1a and 2a adapters are pretty common and easy to find.

For audio, it's just a mono RCA jack. That can be adapted to 1/8" (standard size on computers) or 1/4" (standard size on audio equipment) audio jacks.

This is awesome....nice job gdonovan