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Playing a sound BEFORE windows starts on a cab?

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drventure:

Anyone ever tried something like this

In other words, the cab is normally powered off. When you flip the switch, the PC will power up and start it's boot process, but "something else" would immediately start playing a recorded audio track.

I'm thinking take a little cheapy MP3 player, put one MP3 track on it, and hack the power and play buttons to get hit by the same switch that powers the PC up.

But that's just an off the cuff idea.

XP seems to take about 30-40 seconds to load on my cab, which is not bad, and could likely be improved by 5-10 seconds with some tweaking, but I thought it'd be pretty cool to flip the switch and have a 15-20 second audio program play while the pc boots.

I didn't see any posts here of anyone trying that, though, so I thought I'd throw it out there.

severdhed:

sounds like a cool idea, i'd be interested to see how it works out

fallacy:


Integrate one of these LCD picture frames into your cab. You can have video and audio play on power up.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882136225

DeLuSioNal29:

Kind of reminds me of how Macs boot up.  But it's only a small chord, not a long mp3 file.

D

drventure:

Well, a little success on this

I found an old RaveMP2000 I've had for years. I thought I'd lost the cable but, no, it was just buried in a box of old cables I keep around just for this sort of thing  :)



Anyway, my big concern for this was that this dude is so old, it uses a PARALLEL port interface! That, and the LCD screen is starting to fade really bad. At some points in the menus, you can't read em at all.

And the kicker, the old drivers don't work under Vista (or XP, or hell, Windows 2000 or NT4 for that matter, Win98 only baby!)

Sooooo. I pulled out the driver app I'd written for it back in 2002, ran it, couldn't detect the device. <sigh>

So I started poking around. Well, first, I had to install NTPORT (a DLL/OCX that allows VB6 programs to get at the PPorts under NT). That thing itself hasn't been updated since 2004, but lo and behold, it's still out there, and after a few false starts, I got it installed and registered.

Back to my app, run it, Oh yeah! I actually got the file list out of that thing!

it's got a whopping 32mb storage, turns on instantly, looks like it can start playing a track within less than a second from being turned on, AND has a DC3v external power plug, so no batteries to futz with.

All I +SHOULD+ have to do is wire up a relay driven contact to the PLAY button and I'll be good to go.

At least, that's the theory right now.

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