its no more waste than receipt printers primary function at the checkout counter.

in fact, this is “less” waste since it has actual entertainment value and I bet Josh and his team learned some new things in the process. how’s that for waste? other receipt printers can only hope to one day reach this level!

OMG i am doing this today!

I have a PICO projector and a Epson TML-90…

My receipt printer just spits out RSS feeds all day, now I can play games on it!? YES!!!

Anyone have any idea how the projection is implemented? It seems like a nice effect. Its only alluded to in the description as a “Light Beamer”…

Trek?

Infocom?

Perhaps replace the projected car with a pen to draw your path – permanent record of the game.

Looks insanely fun though.

what if you could make it like a whiteboard somehow….make it erasable between frames of animation…

have some material that is electrostatically charged (via a laser printer type system?)…but dont bond the “toner” to the material permanently. have this setup in some kind of continuously running loop, with an eraser somewhere in the loop. and run this loop very fast to give illusion of animation.

i’m just rambling but does anybody follow what im thinking about?

@engunneer: What are you talking about? Beamer is not what English people call a projector, they call it a projector.

I have never heard anyone in England refer to a projector as a beamer, or ever read it anywhere.

@the cageybee

+1

The finish line is pink or green.

Lol. Love it.
It reminds me of a “blind” pinball game I created for a teletype terminal connected to a PDP11. were flipper control, space the ball shooter, the bell provided auto feedback and P printed off the pinball arena – for those who needed it. All written in fortran. Such a lovely language.

I remember typing in a game in school. I think it was on C64 (possibly a ZX81). Looked almost identical, vertical scrolling was done by virtue of printing another line. Player looked like !!

I seem to remember being very happy when I managed to add ‘levels’ in the form of making the track narrower!

Reminds me of Pitfall, the old dos game.
http://www.dosgamesonline.com/index/game/565/Pitfall.html

Its the Playstation TREE! :P

I think the closest predecessor is SFcave for palmOS.
http://www2.sunflat.net/en/index.html

The scrolling technique is really ancient… I go back as far as TRS-80 model 1, Ohio Superboard etc (~1978), and it’s older than that.

Scrolling games like this often came about because the terminal (eg: TTY) didn’t allow either memory access or absolute cursor positioning (character graphics).

Often for boxes like the TRS-80, Basic just wasn’t fast enough to block move the characters to do 4-way scrolling.

So, carriage return/linefeed scrolling was easy and fast enough to be fun.
Skiing games, racing games etc. Dig up a “learn to program Basic” type book circa 1980 and you’re bound to find at least one.

Come to think of it, it also had some sort of metal contacts on another drum that would stop it and sound a crash when you “hit” another car on the road, wait a second and then let it roll again.

It was a completely mechanical version of this game. I never opened it, but that’s how I imagine it worked.

Couldn’t you reduce the paper wastage by re-using the tracks?
Then you would not need to keep using fresh paper

…or you could just run MAME and your choice of old arcade scroller on the computer the “beamer” is connected to, and get rid of the whole printer thing (and instantly become 99% greener).

…or you could “beam” the road and obstacles, and wiggle a toy car left and right on a printer head assembly – same result.

Some projects just seem to be contrived for the sake of contrivedness. Wanna make a full mechanical scroller? Fine, but this ain’t that. Wanna play with augmented reality? Fine too, but this ain’t that either…

Good idea about the LEDs and glow paper emilio. Iron filings and magnets would be a stretch but I wouldn’t put it past some of these hackers.