I know a few of you saw this at my last arcade party, but I figured I'd finally get around to posting this in the general forum for everyone to see.
It's from Spencer's, called the 3D Laser Party Light: http://www.spencersonline.com/product/ss-3d-laser-party-light/ . It's only $169 (cheapest RGB projector I've found anywhere, and actually decent quality), and it comes with built-in animations... but if you pop the back off the case, there's an SD card inside, which holds all the animations. Of course I've modified these to be mostly arcade related.
I also made some modifications to make it better. The original projector comes with a 405nm laser as the "blue" laser, which is really tough to see, since it's basically blacklight color (shows up blue if you project onto paper). I actually damaged this laser diode right before my last party, so I had a good excuse to replace it with a 445nm true blue laser diode. Of course those that saw it at the party might have noticed that the colors were dim and not well balanced, since I had to turn the other colors way down to try to match the half dead violet laser.
Like taking good videos of a vector monitor, it's really difficult to take a good video of this, since the lasers have such high contrast in the dark, and the refresh isn't consistent on all frames. And once all the compression and youtube "optimization" is done, it comes out looking kinda crappy. It looks really cool in person though (like an extremely large vector monitor on the wall).
For those interested in the technical stuff, you can see a bunch of details in a post I made on a laser forum, which also details my modifications, here: http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums...quot-Laser-3D-Party-Light-quot-from-Spencer-s .
The frames were mostly exported from MAME by a custom build I made, which were then converted to the correct format by a program called LaserBoy. I also converted some bitmaps using another app called bmp2ild. Some animations were pulled from other shows scattered around the internet as well.
I have a few more plans for it... one of which is to modify it to be controlled by a PC in real-time (so you can actually play games on it).
If anyone plans to buy one of these... I've found that there are at least two versions of this projector. The new version is far superior to the old one, so if possible, you should try to inspect it before purchasing. If you look at the other forum post, you can see pictures of both so you know what to look for.
DogP
It's from Spencer's, called the 3D Laser Party Light: http://www.spencersonline.com/product/ss-3d-laser-party-light/ . It's only $169 (cheapest RGB projector I've found anywhere, and actually decent quality), and it comes with built-in animations... but if you pop the back off the case, there's an SD card inside, which holds all the animations. Of course I've modified these to be mostly arcade related.
I also made some modifications to make it better. The original projector comes with a 405nm laser as the "blue" laser, which is really tough to see, since it's basically blacklight color (shows up blue if you project onto paper). I actually damaged this laser diode right before my last party, so I had a good excuse to replace it with a 445nm true blue laser diode. Of course those that saw it at the party might have noticed that the colors were dim and not well balanced, since I had to turn the other colors way down to try to match the half dead violet laser.
Like taking good videos of a vector monitor, it's really difficult to take a good video of this, since the lasers have such high contrast in the dark, and the refresh isn't consistent on all frames. And once all the compression and youtube "optimization" is done, it comes out looking kinda crappy. It looks really cool in person though (like an extremely large vector monitor on the wall).
For those interested in the technical stuff, you can see a bunch of details in a post I made on a laser forum, which also details my modifications, here: http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums...quot-Laser-3D-Party-Light-quot-from-Spencer-s .
The frames were mostly exported from MAME by a custom build I made, which were then converted to the correct format by a program called LaserBoy. I also converted some bitmaps using another app called bmp2ild. Some animations were pulled from other shows scattered around the internet as well.
I have a few more plans for it... one of which is to modify it to be controlled by a PC in real-time (so you can actually play games on it).
If anyone plans to buy one of these... I've found that there are at least two versions of this projector. The new version is far superior to the old one, so if possible, you should try to inspect it before purchasing. If you look at the other forum post, you can see pictures of both so you know what to look for.
DogP


