So, the status of “LaserMAME” has always been kind of up in the air. Links to one associated site, NightLase laserMAME, are currently down. There was that excellent video that circulated the net under the filename lasermameNTSC.mpeg, but I don’t really even know who created that. I’ve played Asteroids in color on a Pangolin system, so I’m not sure if that was a complete clone or what–(ask me about that story sometime in person)–and finally, there has been some discussion on the LaserFreak and Pangolin Forums that seemed as if there was some question about who did the work and who has the rights to LaserMAME. I think a system was even commercialized and available for rental at some point.

Frankly, I’m not really interested in getting in to those politics. But one recent event got me–uhm…motivated–to enter the arena of playing classic vector games on a laser projector. It seems like a most natural thing to do and looks completely awesome. Even the high end graphics people at SIGGRAPH this year loved the ultimate saturation and archaic wireframe visuals generated by a laser projector playing vector games from ‘79 and the 80’s.

When Paul Debevec introduced the Electronic Theater showing we were fortunate enough to have at the NCSA building on November 8th, he excitedly highlighted the laser enabled MAME setup that they had installed when first showing these videos in San Diego. I was excited to hear this and even more pleased when he put up the photo of the renown laserists and others involved with getting the system working; Steve Heminover (who I’ve been lucky enough to meet), Matt Polak, and others.

I have an extreme amount of respect for the people involved here. They’re the world’s experts on laser display, and the production quality was fantastic, but I must admit through the whole video demo, I was thinking, “Hey, it can’t be that hard–everything is already in vector format. What’s the big deal.”

So last night after we got some ice cream at Cold Stone, despa and I got to coding. It took a good 2 or 3 hours to get MacMAME to compile. After that, in another couple of hours we hacked up a prototype of laserMAME using the EasyLaseUSB on Mac OS X. I know we’ve got the math wrong (we didn’t know the range of the x and y coords–and the documentation is temporarily unavailable on the MAME website), but we got Asteroids working with some display bugs.

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I think another couple of nights of hacking could make it really beautiful.

I apologize for the poor quality of the projection, images, and video, but I was so excited we got something working, I wanted to publish right away. I expect we’ll have much better results before, say, March 2008. More to come.