This was something I had in my archives from college; I thought it would be interesting if theaters could, instead of buying an expensive lighting board, just hook their lighting system up to a retail PC to control it.
My friend Greg and I poked at this for a bit. This project was to deal with driving the hardware and a separate app was to be the front end.
We never got far on this project, at the time I didn't have access to any sort of DMX hardware I could drive from a PC, and if I were to look through these files, I'm sure we overengineered this into surrender almost immediately.
That being said, a simple Google search will show that other people also thought the concept was good, and you can see that commercial products to drive DMX systems via a PC exist in the world now, and that's good enough for me, honestly.
So this is just for the history books, it isn't much, and I don't expect I'll be looking at this further.
--ryan (icculus@icculus.org).