however, my testing has revealed that the SEs that i was planning to use as my least-common-denominator (and most common compact mac in my collection...) can't seem to handle quicktime. at least not quicktime 1.5, for which i have an install disk.

i have been unable to find an earlier version online that might be usable on a 68000. is there such a thing? 1.5 has the requirement (i think) of a 68020 or better (and system 7.1), and i thought maybe 1.0... then there's the problem of creating quicktime files that will play under 1.0...

anyhow, any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. i might just have to go out and look for a pallette-load of SE/30s or (better yet) color classics and leave the SEs for another project.

quote:

---

in my neverending quest to find something useful (sic) to do with my growing collection of classic 68k macs, i've decided to try and put together a small video wall installation (see http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55153,00.html)

however, my testing has revealed that the SEs that i was planning to use as my least-common-denominator (and most common compact mac in my collection...) can't seem to handle quicktime. at least not quicktime 1.5, for which i have an install disk.

i have been unable to find an earlier version online that might be usable on a 68000. is there such a thing? 1.5 has the requirement (i think) of a 68020 or better (and system 7.1), and i thought maybe 1.0... then there's the problem of creating quicktime files that will play under 1.0...

anyhow, any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. i might just have to go out and look for a pallette-load of SE/30s or (better yet) color classics and leave the SEs for another project.

---

Proud Liberator of over 25 Macintoshes!

What I like about this would be that if your display is sufficiently large, you could use 4, 9 or 16 pixel halftone patches for each TV Pixel in order to get a grayscale image on an SE. As a matter of fact, if each patch were an ASCII character in a custom bitmap font and you only sent the changed pixels (jpeg) to each SE over appletalk, you could probably write a microscopic program and have it, the font and System all within your 4MB max RAM ceiling and Appletalk might be able to handle the load using a stack of ethernet Macs as bridges so your video out is fed over 10baseT to an SE30 that displays its assigned screen of pixels and pushes the rest as an AppleTalk Bridge to the remainder of its row of SE's over PhoneNet/Appletalk. Each row of SE/30's would be fed its 10baseT stream from a hub that's uplinked at 100baseT. Each of those 100baseT to would be uplinked to Gigabit Hubs that'd talk to your video Mac (the G5 or even the G6 should be out by the time you're ready to go! )

OOPS!!!! I guess I pushed that one just a little bit too far!™

backing off somewhat on quicktime on the pre-color quickdraw SEs - and yes, i want to show movies in the glory of one bit color - i thought maybe i could put together something in hypercard. my next experiment will be to put together a hypercard stack that just flips through a series of PICTs, say, one per second. i can output a quicktime to a series of picts, convert them to bitmaps, and cut them up into 512x342 chunks, and throw the chunks onto the SEs

not exactly 30FPS animation, but i think the effect would still work - especially if i can get the individual pieces as synchronized as possible. heck, i may even be able to automate most of the production process with applescript and photoshop actions.

i'll report back once i have a chance to try it (and find a hypercard manual somewhere...)

quote:

---

er... yeah, trash. just a *little* too far.

---

Actually, it makes a lot more sense than I thought it did at first, but I have been known to get a little caried away.

Maybe you could automete the process of segmenting a video like Charlie Chaplain's Modern Times and have the frames saved to each machine's HDD over Appletalk and then control/synchronize the playback over AppleTalk. The software tools that come with the video cards for 630's can chop up a captured image into individual frames. I don't know if it would be possible to automate the cookie cutter removal of the display pixels from the dropped gridwork, but it seems like it should be easy enough with a simple program once all the VidCap frames were saved as incremental pict files.

An "installation" of SE's looping Modern Times with a flickery look would actually be great from an interpretive/artistic POV. I think I'll float this idea for Tekserve's MWNY booth next year!

jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

Milo

68k Macintosh Liberation Army Forums

© 2001-2003 68kMLA