Hardware Mood Enhancer

[Technomancer]

I've been designing an interesting little toy in my spare time that makes Doom really, really cool. The only problem with it is that my programming skill is minimal at best :-/

Anyways, what it is is a strobe light that is responsive to the type of sound being played by the sound card in certain situations.

For example, if you we're to fire the pistol, whenever the gun shot sound played the strobe light would flash once, if you we're to fire the chain gun the strobe light would continue to flash at the rate of the bullet sounds until you ceased firing.

I'm still stuck at the computer stage still though, the harware part is the easy one! Anyone interested?

[Shakadi]

That sounds awesome, though it could be annoying at times. Though it would also make it seem like you are playing the game as it would be like gun fire. I would try it out, only if I had a strobe light.

[Mr. Chris]

Muzzleflashes already give off dynamic lighting, if I recall correctly.

[Technomancer]

Yeah, I'm not talking about in the game though, the strobe is in the room with you, if you're like me and play in a pitch black room it could add a very real effect that makes it feel like you're actually there. With surround sound, some ambient room lighting, this strobe system and a good EAX card, Doom could get really scary!

I'm not very good with computer programming though, so I might just use an external MCU to detect certain frequencies outputted by the sound card instead of picking out sound files from JDoom and sending a pulse through the RS232, I'd rather do the second one though :-/ If someone could right a program that would send a Hi Lo pulse thorugh the RS232 port when JDoom played a certain sound then I could design the hardware interpreter no problem and put the schematic up here with instructions on how to build it really cheap! :D If anyone has any ideas, post here or e-mail me back!

[Gish]

they make cold cathodes that have sound activated modules that you the speaker out from your sound card into http://www.directron.com/soundcc.html
is one example...I know all they have is colored lights which you probably don't want but you could probably rig up a strobe light up to it somehow...