Dual Screens With Pandora?

[javaJake]

If you merely want to get the Pandora screen onto your computer, couldn't you buy a cheap S-Video-in card for your computer and put that in?

 

[Lord_Doku]

hmm. this seems just perfect for the DS, if you can stick the 2nd screen on top of the 1 on the Pandora and make an DS emulator send the signal of the upper screen to the 2nd 1 and the signal of the touchscreen to the Panda screen.

this might actually work

 

[mali]

hmm. this seems just perfect for the DS, if you can stick the 2nd screen on top of the 1 on the Pandora and make an DS emulator send the signal of the upper screen to the 2nd 1 and the signal of the touchscreen to the Panda screen.

this might actually work

Isn't that a little bit overkill, for playing DS games? Just buy a DS, that is cheaper

 

[CCmachined]

USB devices are managed on the CPU. would drawing (and rendering stuff onto) 800*480=384,000 pixels every 50th of a second be quite an overhead? hmm. this'd also rule out rendering from the GPU, as the only video out from the GPU is the screen and TV-out. probably not worth it, considering the power draw aswell.

DS emulation? stick the screens side by side or allow the user to hold the Pandora sideways for touchscreen-only games. =]

also: why not just use TV-out with VGA adapter? the pandora supports dual screens this way...

 

[.Gogeta§§J4BR.]

Bus limitations make it unlikely, but still, promising. Just don't expect to get any reasonably high resolution at a usable refresh rate.

It can get a little better by not sending all the raw data the monitor needs. Encode the info, use usb 2.0 to send it, then the convertor decodes it. It'll use less bandwidth, but nothing that magical It's only good for some aplications

 

[Chip]

Bus limitations make it unlikely, but still, promising. Just don't expect to get any reasonably high resolution at a usable refresh rate.

It can get a little better by not sending all the raw data the monitor needs. Encode the info, use usb 2.0 to send it, then the convertor decodes it. It'll use less bandwidth, but nothing that magical It's only good for some aplications

This is already how all USB video adapters work. "Raw" video would require many times the bandwidth that USB can provide.

The main problem, in addition to bandwidth limitations, is that encoding the video to push over the USB port must be done by the CPU. The Pandora can do it, but it doesn't leave much CPU time for whatever program you're trying to run. It is just not a practical solution for most applications.

 

[Etinin]

Well, there's always the DSP to help, but then someone would have to make a specific driver, I guess.

 

[Zoppe]

When i saw this, the first thing that came to mind was multiplayer gaming on the go. then i think, would a portable dvd player + P|&A tv-out + usb\bluetooth controller combo realize this?

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Cool but a little useless.
Well, you speak for yourself It will be extremely useful for me if it works. Pandora is a very small UMPC (you can't deny that ), and I'm attending like 7 conferences each year - carrying 3kg laptop with me is a real hassle, Pandora will solve that problem perfectly. And even better if I will be able to connect it to a projector - so no need to copy my presentation to some local computer.

You could get one of THESE, all you need is your Pandora, mini projector and one of those portable screens

 

[Kag]

Wouldn't something like this work?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.9812

 

[hch]

Wouldn't something like this work?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.9812


:lol: that would be cool if it was the other way round :lol:
sorry, that's vga->s-video

 

[daveski]

Wouldn't something like this work?

This is VGA to SVideo, you need SVideo to VGA ....
I DO like the dinky projector that WarmFluffyUK pointed at.

 

[Kag]

Shouldn't the cables work both ways?
Since it isn't an adaptor

 

[God Ginrai]

Shouldn't the cables work both ways?
Since it isn't an adaptor

Since that allows both S-Video and Composite, then I'm almost certain that is an adaptor.

-God Ginrai

 

[OrR]

Shouldn't the cables work both ways?
Since it isn't an adaptor

I don't think so.

 

[Phawx]

Yea, its an adaptor. You would need something that would be S-video > VGA. They go for like $60 last I looked.

Truthfully I think we would be better off with the usb2vga. We have a couple at work and I barely see them hit the cpu in any meaningful way.

We also have one that is USB Docking station like this:

http://us.kensington.com/html/3721.html

and it doesn't really have that much impact on the CPU at all. Don't know if ARM will be different as I've only tested on x86.

Keep in mind, this is a Sound controller/NIC/external monitor/ps-2 expansion all through 1 USB 2.0 cable.

Max resolution from these USB2VGA is also 1280x1024

 

[fischju2000]

How viable is hijacking the Pandora's LCD output and running a cable out the back to a converter that is recognized as a "smart LCD" - which then converts the signal to whatever you want? The board is capable of running 2 LCDs with resolutions of 1920x1200 each.

 

[ShyGuy]

Personally I'll just be running S-video into my capture card. That way I get decent deinterlacing. Should work well for most games... not a great solution for everyone though, of course.

USB2VGA aside, if you want S-video to look at all decent on a big screen, you will need some sort of upscaler.

 

[sterling976]

Personally I'll just be running S-video into my capture card. That way I get decent deinterlacing. Should work well for most games... not a great solution for everyone though, of course.

Not a great solution for everyone, indeed.

Capture cards generally introduce a delay, even for 'live TV' and are thus not usually suitable for gaming. Depending on your make/model of card, this can be a minor annoyance or a major problem. Even on the better cards, you'll see some latency. I used to run my PS2's video out through my PC, and certain games were tolerable (Prince of Persia trilogy) while others were exercises in futility (VF4).

Granted, my experience has been with coax and RCA inputs to the capture card, but S-Video is an analog format, and must be processed by the capture card's on-board Mpeg encoder or by a software encoder. Either way, you're introducing latency between what's processed on the game console and what's output to your monitor. So unless you're precognizant, you'll be making lag death a reality for a single-player game. :lol:

 

[ShyGuy]

Eh? I've used three separate capture devices and they all worked with very little delay. One TV card I can't recall, a GameBridge (but that's cheating), and lately an Osprey-100 ... which is admittedly very expensive (got it free ).

Anyway, delay is always a possibility, but in many cases it's not so bad. I can feel maybe a tenth of a second delay, which does take a little getting used to, but it's not so bad that I can't beat most people in Smash Bros Brawl - wifi or otherwise. I was a god at PAX this year. XD

EDIT: I'd like to add that most upscalers or upscaling TVs would add a similar - maybe slightly smaller - delay. It's really not as bad as you say in my experience