MAME on vector w/o ZVG?!

[Matthew Fisher]

Just saw this link over at Retroblast!:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/06/mame-oscilloscope-pl.html

This purports to be a hack of MAME that drives the scope thorough the soundcard?!  (see youtube link about Asteroids footage)

I, for one, am skeptical unless we see much more.  I know you can drive a scope with either an arcade board or the ZVG, and, so far, we have no pix of the rig driving the scope or any other details. 

On the other hand, if you can drive a scope with a hacked up soundcard, you should be able to drive any vector monitor...  The possibilities are intriguing, to say the least.  Driving a vector monitor without the ZVG means (1) not having to buy one (2) and freedom from DOS.  The second is more important, I think.  Easier to get sound, you can use a more powerful computer, and control interfaces are greatly simplified.  I will eagerly be watching this...

[ChadTower]

There have been variants of this out for a while... IIRC last time I saw it the primary issue was that the voltages being used here were way out of the range a vector monitor would be expecting.  Maybe they're getting closer to something that would work with a monitor now?

[Level42]

Voltages can be adapted.

There's been some threads about using the soundcard outputs of a computer to do this....Actualy, the creator of the hardware for Star Wars (Jed Margolin) already pointed to this possibility himself on his site:

 http://www.jmargolin.com/mtest/LJfigs.htm

Read the last part...

[ChadTower]

Voltages can be adapted.

There's been some threads about using the soundcard outputs of a computer to do this....Actualy, the creator of the hardware for Star Wars (Jed Margolin) already pointed to this possibility himself on his site:

 http://www.jmargolin.com/mtest/LJfigs.htm

Read the last part...

Yeah, I did some poking around a couple of card specs recently... if I get it, and maybe I'm just not good enough yet, it seems like the sound card itself isn't going to put out the voltage range that would be necessary.  That range is WAY out of human hearing, I think, so there would have to be some more electronics between the sound card and the monitor... which means something like the ZVG, putting us back to square one.

[shardian]

There is a sweet video that has been posted before of a guy doing a demo using a sound card to drive a 'scope. It is jawdropping to say the least.

I have also heard it swings the other way - as in using the sound card to input to scope software on your computer.

[Level42]

Chad, we wouldn't need a ZVG, just some good amping of the signal. The voltages can't be "out of range" of  human hearing, voltages say something about amplitude in audio signals.

If you turn up your radio, the voltages going to the speakers get higher. The _frequency_ could be out of reach of our ears (20hz....20.000 Hz (that upper limit is for the younger amongst us). but I bet today's sound cards can make signals with way higher frequencies. But even so, I don't think that's really neccesary for the old vector games.