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From: sorrow@oak.circa.ufl.edu
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Virtual reality for the PC! (Sort of...*ahem*)
Message-ID: <0094AAC8.48F87280@MAPLE.CIRCA.UFL.EDU>
Date: 26 Jun 91 02:56:14 GMT
Article-I.D.: MAPLE.0094AAC8.48F87280
Sender: news@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU
Reply-To: sorrow@oak.circa.ufl.edu
Organization: University of Florida CIRCA VAX Cluster
Lines: 46

I am working on a tiny little project to try and make my 386 act like
a VR machine....sort of.  Well, I can't afford the body suit and the
holographic display, but I do have VGA and a nintendo power glove. :-)

Anyway, I used some code posted by someone to sync the shutter speed on
a pair of Amiga Xspecs 3d glasses to my vertical retrace (whoever posted
that stuff...THANKS!).  I now have full 3d on my monitor, kind of nifty.
Rewiring is pretty easy.  All it involves is changing the 12v input of
the glasses to accept a 5v output from an RS232C (RTS or DTR high and low
toggle the glasses...high-left eye shut, low-right eye shut or something
like that).

Anyway, by synchronizing the shuttering of the two lenses with swapping pages
of screen images, each with an image slightly offset from each other, I get
3d.

This is nifty, but animatioyn is a bitch and a half (try updating two screens
of VGA in eral time in less than 1/60th of a second).  That I will worry about
later.

What I am doing now is trying to wire any and/or all of the following:

Nintendo Power Glove
Nintendo Helmet Laser Thingy (whatever it is!)

I would like to be able to hook one more to a serial port, and one to a
game port.  That would allow me to also hook up a joystick.

My question is this:  has anyone done this yet?  I want full interactive
head to head tank combat/mechwarriors from hell and am wondering if anyone
has done this.

Finally, for communicattiosn between two PCs, should I write my own ISRs or
should I use a comm package?  I hear the LiteComm package is pretty nice..
has anyone used it?

Brian

/*
Brian Hook -- Specialist in X to ANSI.SYS porting software
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Seamus, that's my dog...I saw her today at the reception...sorry, sixTEEN
inches....better save the women and children first...but this one goes to 11!
..anymore of that plutonium nyborg?....there can be only ONE!....like a 
finger pointing to the moon....ease the seat back...one day closer to death
*/