VR headsets and DosBox \ VOGONS

VR headsets and DosBox

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First post, by DosFreak

Posted on 2006-02-15, 03:45

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The earliest I can remember seeing these things was back when Descent came out and some idiot was wearing one while playing Descent. I always thought it looked pretty foolish. heh.

Anyways I was wondering how they could be implemented to work with DosBox? Did they interface with the game via the COM ports?

Anyone still have any of these things?

If so would it be possible to still hook up an old VR helmet to a PC COM port and interface through DosBox with the game that way?

Hmmmm, also....while the VR is being used did the PC monitor still display graphics? If so this might be a very simple way to implement dual-monitor game support in DosBox.....instead of using the COM->VR you could redirect to COM->secondary DosBox "monitor".

Of course you could probably do this anyway without being so convoluted but it would at least prove that the VR part works.

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Reply 1 of 5, by gulikoza

Posted on 2006-02-15, 11:50

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It was definitely not the comport, since those are way too low speed (115200 bps). They were probably connected to the VGA output with graphics drivers configured to display alternate pictures. Anyway...I don't think those VR helmets are too useful, they always gave me a headache (I believe the helmets had a miniture crt monitors with max 60hz refresh...lcds were not that common back then). Too bad the things didn't stick...the technology available today is so much better - dualhead graphics cards, lcd monitors, etc...

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Reply 2 of 5, by `Moe`

Posted on 2006-02-17, 15:19

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You can still get them, in various variants. Most popular is the "shutter" type, which simply blinds one eye, and the (plain, regular CRT/TFT) screen shows alternating pictures. Used in high-$$$ commercial environments only, though 😉

Reply 3 of 5, by HunterZ

Posted on 2006-02-17, 17:49

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Shutter glasses were very popular and not too expensive a few years ago. One of the problems is that it effectively cuts your framerate in half due to displaying half of the frames on each eye. I remember reading that on CRTs you could crank the refresh rate way up and get a decent effective refresh rate, but on LCDs this isn't as possible.

Reply 4 of 5, by DosFreak

Posted on 2006-02-19, 08:57

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Was testing out Descent 1 in CVS today and noticed the VR options in the setup:

The:

I-glasses! support COM1-COM4

The rest of the VR selections don't list what interface they use....

IIRC, The VFX was the most popular and I found a list of supported games here:

http://www.mindflux.com.au/products/iis/vfx1soft.html

Wow. Lots of games. heh. It even has Duke Nukem Forever on there! hahahaha!

Here's one users experienced with VFX....pretty interesting: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/ … vfx1review.html

Looks like it required a TSR, IRQ, and a Port #.

Well this is pretty cool. Choosing the VR device in the setup program actually works in the game. Currently I have Descent loaded and each half of the screen is showing the same scene with one half for the left-eye and one for the right eye. I'm not sure if it's displaying correctly or not since I never played it like this before but the game does go into a "blur" effect while moving around which is pretty cool. (Stereoscope I guess)

What is really weird is that it's outputting @ 640x480 whereas normally Descent 1 is 320x200.....So I guess 320x240 for each eye?

It looks like they can user either Video/Serial/Parellel depending on what VR your using.....

Mabye another reason to include LPT support in DosBox? 😉