I thought that most VRAM was dual-ported - in fact, according to techtarget.com, dual-port is one of the major differences between VRAM and normal RAM. It can't be too hard to find.

Simple method for Displaying Empeg on any Video Monitor.
With the Via Epia motherboards with CPU and flash disk now available for £75, a very simple Empeg display unit could be created.
As the Mobo is pretty inclusive vga, video out, spdif, Lan, usb etc One could simply add a DC regulator circuit and a ethernet crossover cable to the Empeg and by running the Empeg web interface with the HI/LO kernal mods you could output the mpeg display in 24 bit colour to any y/c or cvbs video monitor in high quality resizable output.
If one used an 6.4" earthlink vga panel or a USD LCD output http://www.massworks.com/ you could even use a touchscreen for remote control and gain the ability to run emplode, gps, etc in the car.
Further, with the simple addition of a hdd you could even run dvd's or other media (mp3 ??) ;-) in the car but this kind of defeats the point of our Empegs and therfore may not be the way you wanted to solve your problem, after all incar pc is kind of mutually exclusive with EMpeg.
However if you were keen an epia (fanless) it and the PSU would fit in a box the smaller than a poweramp, mine sits under the passenger seat and cost less than 100 bucks.
Obviously not as elegant as redesigning the entire Empeg display subsystem but with some lateral thinking, like that that created our fabulous Empegs there are often many ways to solve a particular problem.
Best Regards
Max
80gb mk2, epia-eden, honda X, alpine pxa H700 (soon).

What was it that the Amersfoort display actually did? Was it a replacement/duplicate empeg front-panel display or did it show alternate data? If the latter, what sort of alternate data was it and did it show it concurrently with normal empeg operation?

Given that there are now in-car DVD players and a pair of VCDs (about 1.2 GB) can hold a movie with reasonable quality (especially considering the fairly small displays that would be appropriate in this environment) and we can now get 120GB worth of data in our empegs, it would be cool to be able to hold and display 100 different movies on the empeg. Of course, I have no idea if the ARM in the empeg could do real-time MPEG-2 system stream decoding. But maybe an off-board controller could if it could just throw the data at it.

(Am I just reiterating what other people have said? Maybe I missed a thread somewhere. This all seems so obvious now.)

What was it that the Amersfoort display actually did? Was it a replacement/duplicate empeg front-panel display or did it show alternate data?

From what I gathered, it was an actual video-out plug on the player. The output was the same as what was on the empeg screen, just enlarged to fit an NTSC/PAL video display. It applied a false-color palette to the monochromatic empeg shades (and from what Patrick said, the palette was user-selectable).

Didn't rob say that they used the rio centrals UI to get the color? Either way, it's a neat hack that I'm sure plenty of people would enjoy.

I think a seperate tiny PC is really going to be the easiest way for people to do this... It wouldn't take much...

Matthew

A PC using ethernet and VNC would work. But at that point, why have the empeg in your car at all? Just use the PC to play MP3s and also have full screen WinAmp visuals.

Yes, I know the empeg car is superior to most PC MP3 player systems. I'm just saying that if one has already gone to the trouble of car-mounting a PC with an in-dash video display, then the dash-mounting of the empeg is not going to be an issue for them.

someone said there were pictures somewhere of the display but i coudlnt locate thme on riocar.org anyone care to post some that was at the meet?

You know what? I don't think they're at riocar.org. I think one of the empeg team posted them directly on his own site. But now I don't remember the link. The link is somewhere in a thread on this BBS. Anyone have it?

http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/photos/empeg/2002/

It's on the 15th in the Afternoon. (You'll see what I mean when you get there.)

Thanks!

Well, from my memory of the various discussions about patrick's video out, didn't he essentially mount a seccond ARM processor inside the empeg to handle the video out? Most people are more comfortable working with x86, and there are plenty of pre-built solutions available...

I don't think I need to convince anyone here the reasons to go with an empeg over any other PC based solution. The motherboard posted above could easily be configured so that you'd never even know it was a PC doing the work -- boot off flash into linux and start grabbing the display and outputting it to the video out... Man, this tranparent PC booting into linux stuff is sounding familiar. What could be more l33t than having two computers running linux in you car?

Matthew

What the heck is this thing?

Tom

The prototype DJ unit.

What does it do?

Tom

Lets you "mix" mp3s in the same way a DJ would mix records on a speed-controlled turntable. The big circular object is the "turntable"

I thing the weird bit though is he sends the video signal up the IDE bus inot what is basically another computer.

It won't actually mix though - for that you'd need 2 decks and an external mixer.
It is the functional equivalent of a DJ turntable - allows you to scratch, adjust speed, positioning, start/stop with differing abruptness etc. , just that you don't have to carry all those big round plastic bits with you...

IIRC, there was some talk of a possibly more consumer-targeted version where a single unit would decode/control 2 mp3s and mix them.

/Michael

Picture now rotated to make it slightly more obvious...

VRAM is by definition dual-ported. Most video cards today use faster single port memory but VRAM makes less demanding designs far easier.

You can't simply piggyback those on to (most) other types of memory though :-(

Cheers,

Rex.

A PC using ethernet and VNC would work. But at that point, why have the empeg in your car at all? Just use the PC to play MP3s and also have full screen WinAmp visuals.

Actually...I used to have just that...a pc mounted in my car using winamp and a remote to control it (eventually I added a 8.4" touchscreen LCD.) When you have run something like that, you realize that the hardest thing to duplicate about the empeg is not the hardware (although patrick has given us quite an elegant piece of hardware to work with), it's the software. The software that controls the empeg is by far the best music playing software I've ever used, and in my opinion is far better than winamp or anything else on the PC. Quite often, I plug in my empeg right beside my PC and use it, even though I have all the same music on my PC, because the software on the empeg is so much better. The Cambridge team has created a true masterpiece in my opinion, and I think it'll be quite a while before we see it's equal on the PC or on commercial decks from Sony, Pioneer or others. I can sum it up in my first impression of the empeg when I got it -- "Finally...someone gets it!"