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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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...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.
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)
You can also view the MPEG at Zophar's Domain by going here:
Video File
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."
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; }
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