One area of development yet untouched...

So, there are many hardware and software mods available for our empegs, but one "feature" that I want to request is MORE VISUALS!! Come on people; be creative here. It would be nice if the spectrum data was used for some of the current visuals that use the oscilloscope views...

Would it be possible for someone to make an API to allow for other people to create new visuals more easily (like a FIFO with the spectrum (FFT) data, etc.?)

Heck, even I might make some new visuals if the API was easy enough...

There was talk, a long time ago, about making an API for the visuals. It didn't happen because of time/money constraints. Now, with the player long since EOL'd, I wouldn't hold out hope for this feature unless it was something they planned on adding to the Karma and needed a big testbase of geeks for it.

Actually, the "pole dancers" visual *is* a BBS hack (of the original stick figures visual), that later got integrated into the player s/w. And there's an editor around here somewhere for that one.

Plugins would be cool, but ..

Since people are able to create pacman and such games couldnt it be possible to write a program to act as a visual? I know it wouldnt be the same but could be cool. Now I know nothing on how to program anything in linux the closest i know about programming is a lil in php which is far from it.

Yes you could do that but it would not show up on the "Visuals" menu and would not be part of cycling through the visuals. You would have to launch it from Hijack (or perhaps from Emphatic).

Or maybe it would be so cool that it would be implemented by empeg.

Agreed. If the visual was able to run correctly on the empeg (as a "standalone app") and take the audio feed as input, how difficult (aside from time issues) could it be for Cambridge to add it?

Of course I could be missing something fundamental.

If the visual was able to run correctly on the empeg (as a "standalone app") and take the audio feed as input, how difficult (aside from time issues) could it be for Cambridge to add it?

It would require that it be rewritten to work inside the framework of the empeg's visual engine.

The visuals on the empeg are not a standalone apps, they're based on sets of internal functions. Someone who writes their own external program would be reinventing a bunch of wheels. So in essence, translating an external app to run within the empeg's visuals framework would be a porting project.