I was looking into this for a few years and from what I found most LCDs block between 9/10 and 19/20 of the light coming through them.. So your 3500 lumen lamp is going to be at best a 350 lumen projected image. I was looking in to using a grow light (~140k lumens) to result in a whopping 14k lumen projected image. Never got around to it though.. I ended up just snagging a burly 3000 lumen 400:1 contrast ratio LCD projector on ebay for ~$1400.
There were a bunch of units that did this, but it was a bit more complicated than the flash carts that the GBA has. Basically you have a big machine (almost as big as the SNES itself) that you plug in to the cartridge port that has a floppy drive built in. I personally had a UFO Super Drive, but the Multi Game Doctor was probably the most popular one.
The pain in the ass part about em was that you had to store all the roms on floppies, which sometimes meant segmenting them.. The unit would load the roms off the floppy into memory, and then you'd run from there. Worked great as long as you had enough RAM in your unit to load the game you wanted to play. A lot of the big SNES rpgs were too big for my 18mbit unit though.:/
..that this article is just a rehash of an article that was posted *BACK IN JUNE*. I thought it all seemed a little too familiar. It was even posted on slashdot back THEN.
Prolly a bit late in the thread for this, but my psuedo-company is doing a showing of anime from about the 4th to the 7th of July at the outdoor music festival on the Oregon/Washington border called, the Phoenix Festival. We're going to be showing all sorts of random stuff over the course of those 4 days.. A pretty complete list of what the plan is is up here. We're also pondering doing some sort of free theater thing in the park during the summer in the seattleish area, assuming we could get permits and whatnot. On the note of stores, we have a semi-lame webstore up at http://store.superlime.com. It's basically still in proof of concept state.. I'm still reworking the gfx I did in paintbrush.:)
At any rate, I dunno if anyone that reads slashdot is even going to phoenixfest, but if you do and you didn't already know me, come say hi!:)
A friend of mine and I had been discussing this EXACT concept a few mos ago.. It doesn't seem like it would really be that hard to implement assuming the power requirements for refreshing the ram weren't too high..
Power wise, it seems like you could just mount a nicad battery on whatever was holding the ram and just have it recharge while the system was powered on. That way you'd get a pretty decent life I'd think.
But someone else brought up something my friend and I hadn't thought of when we were discussing.. The issue with the speed of the bus being the limiting factor.. I wonder if you used like an Ultra2 scsi controller if then you could maybe hit the "theoretical" 80mb/s rate rather than what you usually see of being more in the 4-10mb/sec range? Still probably not as fast as if you could somehow have it tie in with the real ram, but better than a normal hd.:)
There has to be some way to do it though.. Maybe new motherboard manufacturers will start adding in extra DIMM slots for ram disk.. Definitely nice to be able to have a 2gb ram disk you could store your os partition on.:) I actually used to run one of my macs off a RAM disk.. I just set aside like 128mb for the OS (*sigh*.. remember when OSes took up less than a gig of install space? Or fit on to a fuxing floppy for that matter.), and it'd boot in about 1/10th the normal time. I could crash and reboot and whatnot and the data was fine.. Only thing that killed it was if I turned off the power.
Back on track.. This definitely wouldn't be something you'd want to store your 40gb mp3 collection on, but it'd be nice to leave things on that you needed uberfast access to.. i.e. OS files, imaging/video scrap and project files, etc..
Just thought I'd add in my $.02 since I already had this discussion w/ a friend.:)
Well if you look closely at their pattent, it says:
"The TV streams are converted to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation and are parsed and separated it into video and audio components."
Note that it doesn't say *WHICH* MPEG format, that means that they get the patent for MPEG1, MPEG2 (which is what they use), or DIVX.. Which is basically just a hacked verion of MPEG4.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmmm. Picocurries.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
All you need is a counter rotating bed, and it'd be the perfect bachelor pad!
-superlime
I was looking into this for a few years and from what I found most LCDs block between 9/10 and 19/20 of the light coming through them.. So your 3500 lumen lamp is going to be at best a 350 lumen projected image. I was looking in to using a grow light (~140k lumens) to result in a whopping 14k lumen projected image. Never got around to it though.. I ended up just snagging a burly 3000 lumen 400:1 contrast ratio LCD projector on ebay for ~$1400.
There were a bunch of units that did this, but it was a bit more complicated than the flash carts that the GBA has. Basically you have a big machine (almost as big as the SNES itself) that you plug in to the cartridge port that has a floppy drive built in. I personally had a UFO Super Drive, but the Multi Game Doctor was probably the most popular one.
:/
The pain in the ass part about em was that you had to store all the roms on floppies, which sometimes meant segmenting them.. The unit would load the roms off the floppy into memory, and then you'd run from there. Worked great as long as you had enough RAM in your unit to load the game you wanted to play. A lot of the big SNES rpgs were too big for my 18mbit unit though.
-superlime
..that this article is just a rehash of an article that was posted *BACK IN JUNE*. I thought it all seemed a little too familiar. It was even posted on slashdot back THEN.
:)
Short term memory loss?
Prolly a bit late in the thread for this, but my psuedo-company is doing a showing of anime from about the 4th to the 7th of July at the outdoor music festival on the Oregon/Washington border called, the Phoenix Festival. We're going to be showing all sorts of random stuff over the course of those 4 days.. A pretty complete list of what the plan is is up here. We're also pondering doing some sort of free theater thing in the park during the summer in the seattleish area, assuming we could get permits and whatnot. On the note of stores, we have a semi-lame webstore up at http://store.superlime.com. It's basically still in proof of concept state.. I'm still reworking the gfx I did in paintbrush. :) :)
At any rate, I dunno if anyone that reads slashdot is even going to phoenixfest, but if you do and you didn't already know me, come say hi!
ADB is the Apple Desktop Bus.. Apple's method for connecting mice/keyboards/etc to the computer.
:P
Kinda silly 15th anniv since they've basically killed it off on the newer models (stranding people who have ADB tablets and dongles.
A friend of mine and I had been discussing this EXACT concept a few mos ago.. It doesn't seem like it would really be that hard to implement assuming the power requirements for refreshing the ram weren't too high..
:)
:) I actually used to run one of my macs off a RAM disk.. I just set aside like 128mb for the OS (*sigh*.. remember when OSes took up less than a gig of install space? Or fit on to a fuxing floppy for that matter.), and it'd boot in about 1/10th the normal time. I could crash and reboot and whatnot and the data was fine.. Only thing that killed it was if I turned off the power.
:)
Power wise, it seems like you could just mount a nicad battery on whatever was holding the ram and just have it recharge while the system was powered on. That way you'd get a pretty decent life I'd think.
But someone else brought up something my friend and I hadn't thought of when we were discussing.. The issue with the speed of the bus being the limiting factor.. I wonder if you used like an Ultra2 scsi controller if then you could maybe hit the "theoretical" 80mb/s rate rather than what you usually see of being more in the 4-10mb/sec range? Still probably not as fast as if you could somehow have it tie in with the real ram, but better than a normal hd.
There has to be some way to do it though.. Maybe new motherboard manufacturers will start adding in extra DIMM slots for ram disk.. Definitely nice to be able to have a 2gb ram disk you could store your os partition on.
Back on track.. This definitely wouldn't be something you'd want to store your 40gb mp3 collection on, but it'd be nice to leave things on that you needed uberfast access to.. i.e. OS files, imaging/video scrap and project files, etc..
Just thought I'd add in my $.02 since I already had this discussion w/ a friend.
*bonk*
:)
From the page:
Placa de Rede Embedded 10/100Mbps (RJ-45 Port)
Which translates to, embedded 10/100.
Well if you look closely at their pattent, it says:
"The TV streams are converted to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation and are parsed and separated it into video and audio components."
Note that it doesn't say *WHICH* MPEG format, that means that they get the patent for MPEG1, MPEG2 (which is what they use), or DIVX.. Which is basically just a hacked verion of MPEG4.