Hey,
First time poster, but long time dreamer of owning an RGB laser projector. Anyway, while I was at the mall the other day I dropped into Spencer's, and a laser projector making arbitrary images caught my eye (much cooler than the normal laser kaleidoscopes that they usually have). I wasn't sure that it was worth the $200 price tag, so I went home and researched it. I ended up finding out that it was actually marked down to $169, and that there really aren't many full color laser projectors cheaper than that.
So I went and bought it, planning on disassembling it and hopefully hacking it to be controlled by a microcontroller or maybe a PC. When I opened it up, I noticed it had an SD card in it! I popped it into the computer and found .ild files and a .prg text file sequencing the .ild files.
This is the projector on Spencer's site: http://www.spencersonline.com/produc...r-party-light/
I'm an electrical engineer, and my main hobby interest is classic video games, especially arcade games... I have about 40 arcade/pinball machines in my basement ( http://www.projectvb.com/arcade/ ). Several of the arcade games are vector games (like Tempest, Star Wars, Gravitar, etc)... and I think it'd be REALLY cool to play these games on the projector. I remember seeing a video of Tempest being played on LaserMAME a LONG time ago, though I don't see that happening on this projector.
What I would like to do is create a .ild file of several sequences from arcade games, like the Gravitar title screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyQX_SokUPk @ 0:10), and project it on the ceiling in my arcade. Anyone have any tips? I've found several applications for creating frames for .ild files, and .bmp converters, but I imagine a smarter method would be to just draw the vectors as the vector display does, rather than rasterizing, then re-vectorizing. Has anyone done anything like this?
I'll post some disassembled pics, and technical details in a follow-up post shortly, in case anyone's interested.
Thanks,
DogP