A friend Adam. he was playing this game Trace Vector -
and it looked really neat, it was done this retro-style the same as asteroids
and some other arcade games.
And the difference is it actually did using conventional
LCD screen unlike the vector displays
so computers all them use
for the last many years use screens that are raster
based so they start at the top and they go to the bottom.
You know effectively draws from the top and goes down in the same with
CRTs
The difference was on some of these retro games they would actually control
position on the beam so they could write out text. I thought to myself
how would I do that? Well conveniently
oscilloscopes have this little X Y feature
in which you can control position of the beam.
Let's uuh turn it off real quick and you can control it
you can move it in the X position and
in the Y position. And when you do this use rather
by controlling the voltage on the X input and the Y input.
That would mean I have to in a voltage from the computer to the oscilloscope at
high-speed. Where am I gonna find a high-speed
digital to analog converter? Conveniently, every computers got this cool thing called
a VGA port
so for all three dollars putting together some resistors and VGA port
I can now take the red and blue channels and hook them up to
X and Y respectively so let's take a look at this computer right here and see
what that would look like
if I were to output that... We're seeing the picture
it's completely meaningless because what's actually happening is
the computer I'll be standing from atop and then going down
and the red color, the amount read how intense it is
is the X position. And the amount of blue or the intensity of blue
is the Y position so this is a picture
even if you can't really see it as one. Let's put it
on the oscilloscope. Have to turn this back
up
there
straight center
okay now we have this image on the oscilloscope
this is done by having the X&Y
hooked up to here here and being able to move the beam
and draw all the text and this little heart shape.
In addition I have this LSM303 here it's a
magnetometer - that I have a magnet in my hand right now so I
basically a non-contact mechanism of input. I can control
various parameters of this game so to speak
with the magnet and the magnetometer. So I'm controlling the little heart.
This is a little bit boring by my standards so I also wrote this game -
and it's not really a game I guess but tech demo
that has a mesh that I can control
using the a the same magnetometer.
It's calibrated and I go and I can drive around on this wonderful screen, and
you're seeing that
all of these areas it's actually not being rasterized, it's
being drawn by drawing each one of these little line segments one at a time.
This is in the same sort of style of drawing
that games like asteroids and some other arcade games
used. So I now have this vector display
hooked up to this computer and reasonable means to be able to control
the output
so, I'm curious if anybody else is any other interesting things they want to do
with something like this
or just to see where other people go this sort of thing. Hope you liked it
hope you thought it was cool, and don't forget to subscribe to my videos thanks for
watching.
Oh no! It's shrinking
the computer is going to stand by - up oh well