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There's also raphnet, a Montreal chap who offers a USB adapter board for a big chunk of the old joysticks. He also offers the schematics for those who wish to roll their own.

Speed and turnaround. If this was cheaply available to a home user or at least enthusiastic hobbyist (less cheap, more involved) you could still roll out a prototype and test with a turnaround of a few dozen a day. Further, you could continue reducing the design until you found the smallest space necessary without risking as much money. By its nature, it's most likely quite a bit cheaper once broadly available than PCB services given the difference in the quantity and toxicity of materials. No toxic waste disposal, no huge waste of copper, no supply chain for PCB stock, just some card stock or plastic and some magic xerox ink.

Also, these circuits are flexible. What's the value of flexibility? It increases the durability and portability of your finished product. The deal with printed circuits as well is not to make a PCB where you solder parts onto it. The idea is to actually print the entire circuit onto the material and offload anything which requires soldered components onto the portion of the product which is not required to be flexible. That being said, anything you can lay into silicon which doesn't require exotic materials or nanoscale electromechanical properties can be printed onto any slightly heat-tolerant substrate with this technology. This could include printing a transistor radio into cotton, printing RFID tags directly onto luggage tags (imagine if the airline couldn't misplace your luggage because the luggage cart itself knew what it was supposed to be carrying), a home hobbyist printing out addon chips for their retro hardware (NES in mixed stereo anyone?), printing out a better antenna for your laptop's wifi, printing new control wires onto the back of an e-ink display (say, from Esquire)...

All of this is a way off of course, as they're still talking about printing a molten silver compound onto materials, which doesn't strike me as being the sort of task a home laser printer would be up for, not the least of which would be that it'd completely screw up the duplexer and probably the developer drum. Of course, Xerox developing this ink with a low melting point and reliable crystallization patterns (from TFA) may result in some other breakthroughs whereby this comes home a lot faster. All they need is to find a low-resistance nonmagnetic alloy or conductive polymer which melts at laser printing temperatures and won't gunk up a developer unit. (which may be unobtainium.) Either that or a working material which can be applied by inkjet printers.

Your mod file example is great. It's a now archaic format which is no longer in vogue.

Fortunately the LPT port nonsense was a hardware specific nonsense completely independent of the format, and open source code which can reproduce the music on any modern platform is readily available. http://mikmod.raphnet.net/ http://www.modplug.com/ (sourcecode for modplug is availble, believe it or not)

There are also closed solutions: http://www.un4seen.com/

And there are industry standard sound libraries that do the job fine: http://www.fmod.org/

So, it seems that these antiquated technologies (mod dates to 1987) tend to get supported just fine.

Holy crap, I remember those! Anyone have something that'll still play them?

Of course. The format is still in widespread use, although typically more than 4 channels are employed these days (and they aren't hard-coded to left and right channels, as with the Amiga). There are many Pocket PC, Gameboy and Cellphone games that use tracker style playback (most completely MOD compatible) to save storage space.

MikMod, fmod and Hekkus are three different libraries currently used by game developers for mod playback. However since flash storage has increased dramatically over the last couple years, more and more developers are using mp3 format. So that may finally put an end to the use of MODs.

Dan East

I found another cool project that could help a coder roll their own at http://www.raphnet.net/programmation/laserspotcam/ laserspotcam_en.php

"Laserspotcam is designed to run on Linux. It uses the video4linux API for for video capture and sdl for the display. It is released under the terms of the GPL license."

Sorry, no help with the cluster though. ;)

And you could use the open software some guy wrote to control his music with a laser pointer to do the counting... http://www.raphnet.net/programmation/laserspotcam/ laserspotcam_en.php It got posted to the Make blog a few days ago http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/09/compu ter_control_with_a_laser.html

Another example: It's getting harder to find apps that play "tracker module" music, and the programs that are available tend to be awkward and unreliable. Everything went to MP3, and mod music was quickly forgotten.

Winamp does, and there's various ports and frontends of mikmod for virtually every OS imaginable. On the other hand, tracker modules were a very cool form of music, and it's a shame to see them begin to die after the community refused to adopt aa format that supported mp3-encoded samples....

Yeah, the domain was gone. The old developer didn't have time to work on the project so it just sort of disappeared.

They have a new developer and a new site nowadays, though.

Yeah,

I'm using this right now.

I have about 4 other of the "Heart-Shaped" Logitech PS/2 mice in use. These are lower-rez than the Wingman. Comfy shape + 3-buttons for X-11. I dig 'em.

Other than that, I have the over-priced Logitech mobile-optical mouse attached to the ThinkPad.

My first was a Logitech C-7... This was the three-button, "workstation" serial mouse you found on pre-MIPS SGI equipment and CAD PC's in the mid-80's. I'd attach the ASCII picture of this as an appropriate addition, but the lameness filter would block it.

For a trip back see:
LINK
LINK
LINK
and
LINK!

check out SDLcam. I haven't used it yet but it looks sweet.

Screen Shot

check out SDLcam. I haven't used it yet but it looks sweet.

Screen Shot