RE: New XY Monitors

        scanners aren't that accurate, yes we could break them up into
Regions, but to
        get where they intersect to sync consistantly
        scanners are analog devices... take a pencil, draw a zig zag line
down a
        page... then draw a second one right next to it and try to get all
the points at
        the ends of the lines to meet... if there is a game that is R G &
Blue only,
        we could seperate that way as long as any object isn't multi-colored

If the system was that inaccurate, you'd have terrible video quality. They
are apparently accurate enough that you can draw multiple overlapping video
frames without making your line widths inappropriate due to movement of the
lines. No doubt you'd need to calibrate your scanning/projection system
just like any other device of this nature, but given the inherent qualities
of the display device you are already using, I think you'd be ok.

        the MAME driver is a interperter, you don't have code for what is
what... that's
        all handled in the ROM code it self....

which is being emulated and running on your host machine. All the data is
there.

        and yes in MAME there is one catch all vector to raster file that
you can pull
        the vectors and pallet with ease.. that is exactly what we did with
LaserMAME,
        we had to massage the data a bit to reduce some vectors and blanked
lines

The reason you can pull out the vectors for your own use is because the
original machine generates and uses a display list for all the vectors. So,
any machine that is emulating the vector game will also be emulating this
display list in some form. The whole point is that you do have access to
the display list, so you can perform whatever post processing steps you like
to this data before sending it to your scanning devices. In my scenario,
you would do the processing to split the display list and you'd skip the
rasterization.

        now for some games like Battle Zone, there are defiently segmented
regions...
        like the top scoring area... if that was broken off to a different
        region/scanner I could probably eliminate flicker completely with
laser.. but
        would have to add another $8k US of equipment to display it.

No one said that high performance was cheap! It's not unreasonable to me to
believe that if you can spend $8K on a prototype and you're looking to
improve your performance now, and just can't wait for the scanning system
that does 200K points per second, that buying more hardware that *is*
currently available would go a long way. It all depends on your goal.

Good luck!

Joel-

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Received on Tue Nov 21 10:24:30 2000