I would like to be able to stream video (and possibly sound) directly to a compact Mac. The fastest way to get data to a Mac is via the SCSI port. Furthermore, there already exists a many different devices out there (BlueSCSI, RaSCSI) that already implement a virtual DynaPort SCSI/Link device. That device takes raw Ethernet packets and allows the Mac to retrieve them one at a time using a SCSIRead command. Nice.
I did some back of the envelope computations, and an uncompressed Mac screen image is just shy of 21 kilobytes (512 x 342 / 8 / 1024). This is an acceptable size for a UDP packet. Furthermore, the SCSI interface on a Mac Plus can supposedly transfer about 2104 kbps. The screen data is 171 kilobits (512 x 342 / 1024), which would work out to about 12 FPS. Not coincidentally, this is more or less the frame rate MacFlim is able to achieve on a Mac Plus, so the math checks out.
Generally, you have the DynaPort driver and MacTCP acting as a middleware between that raw packets and the application, but my idea is to write an application that bypasses all that and talks to the DynaPort directly, reading UDP packets, doing minimal or no validation, and writing them directly to the screen buffer and/or sound buffers.
This project can spin off in some crazy directions. Imagine that the encoder was running on a more powerful computer, such as a gaming PC with a high-end GPU, and it was live encoding the video as UDP stream for the compact Mac to display. Furthermore, imagine the Mac client application was rigged to send back keystrokes and mouse locations, also via UDP, to the server. Suddenly you can play the latest video games on your Mac and pretend to be living in an alternative world where your compact Mac could run Doom, or Cyberpunk 2077, or Flight Simulator 2025!
I did some back of the envelope computations, and an uncompressed Mac screen image is just shy of 21 kilobytes (512 x 342 / 8 / 1024). This is an acceptable size for a UDP packet. Furthermore, the SCSI interface on a Mac Plus can supposedly transfer about 2104 kbps. The screen data is 171 kilobits (512 x 342 / 1024), which would work out to about 12 FPS. Not coincidentally, this is more or less the frame rate MacFlim is able to achieve on a Mac Plus, so the math checks out.
Generally, you have the DynaPort driver and MacTCP acting as a middleware between that raw packets and the application, but my idea is to write an application that bypasses all that and talks to the DynaPort directly, reading UDP packets, doing minimal or no validation, and writing them directly to the screen buffer and/or sound buffers.
This project can spin off in some crazy directions. Imagine that the encoder was running on a more powerful computer, such as a gaming PC with a high-end GPU, and it was live encoding the video as UDP stream for the compact Mac to display. Furthermore, imagine the Mac client application was rigged to send back keystrokes and mouse locations, also via UDP, to the server. Suddenly you can play the latest video games on your Mac and pretend to be living in an alternative world where your compact Mac could run Doom, or Cyberpunk 2077, or Flight Simulator 2025!
