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 be the front end, and a separate library was to deal with driving the hardware.
The protocol used by lighting boards to talk to lighting systems is called DMX, so we jokingly called this project DaddyMax. It was probably funny in the 1990's, I don't know.
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. Also, if we're being honest, I wasn't super-thrilled with the idea of writing GUI apps anyhow.
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).
