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LaserMAME: Playing Tempest In A Whole New Light
Effugas writes: "Seen on Zophar is one of the slicker hacks I've seen pulled off in recent memory: LaserMAME. A group of hackers actually patched MAME to drive a Pangolin QM2000 Laser Show Controller Card, allowing them "to play Classic Vector Games on large surfaces, for example we could play it on the side of a building, or possibly on the clouds." Tempest, Battlezone, Asteroids, and many other classics work perfectly--though, unfortunately, the Star Wars classics still don't work correctly. Still, the video is incredible."
Is what they're doing tomorrow...
Oct 26th, 2000: This Saturday, we are going for the first large scale Trial... In conjunction with our sister Company Light Wave Laser Productions, we will be playing LaserMAME on the side of at least a 6 Story office building, playing from the Club AREA 51, Pittsburgh, PA. 2100 block of Penn St. in the Strip District. Come check it out...
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Rather have this than a PS2!
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
...and when the Citizens looked to the sky, they saw the giant vector-graphics in the sky.
They knew everything would be allright, Nerd-Boy was being called to the Commisioner's Office.
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Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Looking directly at the source of the beam can cause damage, but looking at the beam or the termination point ( the screen or building in this case ) is safe.
Prolong viewing could possibly have a little effect, but the lasers used here are similar to the ones used in laser shows ( like that one I saw recently with the music of Pink Floyd ).
--Chemguru
Speaking of which, in the movie Tron, the transition between Tron looking at the MCP's ship and Flynn driving the jalopy recognizer, there's a framerate drop down to 12 FPS. Since it's a cross-fade, the rendering computer had to render both scenes at the same time. Once the first scene fades away, the computer stops rendering it, and the framerate jumps back to 24 FPS.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
It is possible to do raster games with a laser controller. My buddy did it 15 years ago -- not actually with a game, but a television image.
This guy was the ultimate tinkerer. He actually built his own laser light show controller from scratch. The way he did the television image was to set up the mirror controllers to sweep the laser across in lines (that's two mirror controllers). Then, he welded a small piece of metal on a third controller, which could block or let the beam through. It would block the beam in proportion to the brightness of the pixel. It was pretty darn cool.
I think these guys really need to do some raster games. It's also a lot easier on the beam controllers.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
hmmmm, let's see, wait for a cloudy day with about a 200' celing, load up missle command and freak out the city. there has to be a law about this somewhere..;)
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I want one!
Oh, and can we make a (beowulf) whole block of these?
Imagine a group of hackers protesting a "no-arcade" local regulation with these mounted on rolling trucks, displaying Tempest on skyscrapers while driving around?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Other than the fact that you've have to play 3 minutes into the future, while you wait for the light to bounce back from the moon.
Just play it off Mir instead. Maybe if you charge $5/game you can get enough to keep it in orbit...
Mr. Ska
You can also view the MPEG at Zophar's Domain by going here:
Video File
As an undergrad years back, we considered putting together a system like this. We were planning to use an obscure game console, the Vectrex (image; emulator ) and projecting on the clouds above Los Angeles.
There are two problems with this approach. First, clouds aren't solid so higher altitude clouds are preferable and higher powered lasers necessary. Secondly, the FAA doesn't like lasers lighting up their airspace and possibly interfering with pilot's vision. The first issue didn't bother us, but lasers have a disadvantage that you can easily track them back to their source.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
You know it was one thing when it was console game and only a crowd of 3 or so could watch and see how bad I sucked at Tempest.
There's not a chance in Hell I would play it in front of a crowd of 500.
In the immortal words of Tim Allen, "I would rather smash my balls flat with a wooden mallet."
The next time you're planning the pyrotechnic show for a building demolition, think about LaserMAME and MAJOR HAVOC! How cool would that be? Play MAJOR HAVOC on the side of a building in 1:1 scale; when the reactor is triggered on level 13 and the little guy escapes in his space ship, the whole building blows up! You have to admit, MAJOR HAVOC was about the coolest vector game ever, and there could be no more fitting and lifelike way to play it than on the side of a six story building (especially in conjunction with implosive demolition, but be sure to get permission from your parents and/or the building owner.)
Yep, in the early 20th century before CRT displays and cameras had been developed, in the experimental dawn of television, people used mechanical scanners for cameras and displays.
The problem with vector video games is that you don't have a regular scan like you do with raster, so raster is actually easier to generate with a laser and mirrors because you just need constantly rotating mirrors.
FWIW, the first home TV recordings (time-shifting, even) were done by recording the analog signal using a wax phonograph recorder. On some examples of these discs, you can visibly see the sync regions, much like you can on a CAV laserdisc.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
As I posted earlier, there is a mirror to the MPEG file available at Zophar's Domain:
http://www.zophar.net/Files/laserm ame NTSC.mpg
unless of course the reflection off the surface is specular[(like a mirror)(and therefore would preserve the energy density of the initially thin-powerful laser beam)] and not diffuse. but big buildings don't have any surfaces which can cause spec......oh wait.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I can see a whole new wave of Vector Graphics games coming out again.
Since I still love Tempest that is a good thing.
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Maybe I am just slow, but it took me 5 minutes to figure out how this article applied to a military standard regarding unwanted RF eminations.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Does anyone have contact information for these folks available (friggin' web site is /.'ed...)
I'd really like to get in touch with them about this...
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Hobyists are pretty much locked out of laser shows as well as open source developers. I just checked the webpage for the processor manufacture. They are proud of the fact the board has a serial number that will play shows written for that serial number board. (dongleware anyone) No wonder laser shows have progressed so slowly. There is no open source one upmanship in the developement circles. Everyone is building from scratch and trying to be best on the market. This makes the shows expensive and amaturish. Just immagine what serious hobyists could do with sharing shows. There would be plenty of great stuff. As example check out some of the great things done with MIDI, clip art, photography, freeware, etc. If all that was avaliable for "shows" was pro written, then all shows would have the uniform feel of a Microsoft Power Point presentation. Anybody else seen all the Microsoft clip art yet. True not everything freeware/opensource/royalty free is fantastic, but you could find just about whatever you need without having to write it from scratch.
The truth shall set you free!
Pity about the rather expensive controller card and additional bits of hardware this requires (and that they seem to be hoarding the source at the moment).
Somewhere down along my "hacks to do" list was to try doing something like this on the cheap. Rather than the laser projector, an oscilloscope would provide the vector image. An ordinary sound card would be used to provide the D/A functionality (using the left and right audio channels to drive the X and Y position of the beam), and perhaps a cheap circuit on a bidirectional parallel port to provide beam blanking or brightness (or an additional analogue channel from a second audio card).
Of course there are problems with accuracy and repeatability when using a sound card for specific D/A conversion, but the initial bit of poking around I did (canned "audio" loops corresponding to image test patterns) suggested that games would at least be recognizable.
that's been talked about and talked about over and over. Hunt around for the /. IRC interview. It's a no go. Sites are on their own.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Right, you can't get back-and-forth motion that fast, so instead you use the same technique that is used in laser printers -- a rotating drum covered with six or eight flat mirrors.
The laser is reflected off of the mirrors on the drum. As the drum rotates, the angle of the laser with respect to the mirror changes, causing the laser to scan in one direction. When the drum rotates far enough, the laser beam drops off the end of the mirror and strikes the next mirror on the drum. This instantly returns the beam to the starting scan position. No back-and-forth mechanical motion is required, only extremely stable and precise rotational motion.
Here is a web page with a drawing of how this works in a laser printer.
Vertical scanning is done the same way. The trick is in keeping both mirror drums rotating at exactly the correct speed and in perfect synchronization with each other.
As a matter of fact, you could probably use the scanning guts of two laser printer to build a laser-projection TV.
Now THAT would be a rockin' hack
We have been projecting video-like images with lasers for several years. Since laser images are inherently vector based, we refer to these types of images as raster images. Yes, obvious and redundant. BUT, you must remember that we are using vectors to emulate the other medium. So I suppose it is not such a false nomenclature when you remeber that X-Y TV's get that extra vector prefix!
The current version of Pangolin's QM2000 (link in earlier post) supports direct projection of any video source -- even a composite input! We routinely project video from a live camera feed at our performances... perhaps those in Pittsburgh this weekend will get a demonstration.
Althought the best scanners today are projecting 50k points per second, this is measured using a special calibration frame. Since the X scanner is only following a sawtooth waveform, it is possible to more than double this speed. The Y scanner is basically relaxing to provide the vertical waveform. The color control comes from the PCAOM, which modulates the color at >120Khz. The results are stunning. Pangolin's website has great infomation on these techniques:
Real Time Video Raster Info
Thus, ANY video or GAME for that matter could be projected -- but the unique quality of laserMAME is that the format stays entirely in the vector realm, and infinite scalabilty is achieved.
George Dodworth
Lightwave International
lasershows.net
Nah, Hemos didn't miss anything. I screwed up--and that's pretty infuriating, because I put *alot* of energy into testing my links.
Ah-duh. Sorry.
--Dan