PYL's big board

[mmb5]

[quote name=\'That Don Guy\' post=\'253068\' date=\'Dec 22 2010, 12:39 PM\']Of course, it also depends on what is meant by "replica".  I wonder how hard it would be to do with 18 LCD computer monitors.

(Didn't Whammy! use just one computer to drive all of the monitors?  How do you drive 18 monitors simultaneously from a single computer, anyway?  I can see, say, a master computer sending signals to 18 "slave" laptops with separate connections to monitors, but can it be done from just one computer?)

-- Don[/quote]
You would have to have a custom driver written, and obviously some sort of hardware contraption to send out 18 signals, but it can be done.  I believe the J! board is now singularly controlled.

[Bryce L.]

by replica, this guy meant a 100% duplicate of the original board. He even was mentioning about how he had someone who he thought would let him measure every inch of the original board. I asked him what his contact's name was, and the guy fudged. Therefore, I think he is full of buffalo chips...

[visualbasicwizard]

[quote name=\'Ian Wallis\' post=\'253051\' date=\'Dec 22 2010, 09:03 AM\']

Seriously though, weren't there 18 projectors?

Actually there were 54 - 3 per square.  The ones which contained prizes could rotate to a new prize once one was hit.  The money squares basically remained static.
[/quote]

On the clip where the Whammy eats the wardrobe man, you can very clearly see the light from the three different projectors in between the spaces on the board as Peter is standing right in front of it.  The three projectors looked like  they were stacked vertically by the way the light bounces up and down when the slide changes.

Check this out at 1:03.  You can see the light betwwen the $2000 and London dancing up and down with the slides changing.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'253072\' date=\'Dec 22 2010, 10:03 AM\']You would have to have a custom driver written, and obviously some sort of hardware contraption to send out 18 signals, but it can be done.  I believe the J! board is now singularly controlled.[/quote]
First off, I'm assuming that people are ignoring the likelihood of the OP's acquaintance being full of what makes the grass grow green merely for the sake of discussion.

That said, would it take a custom driver, necessarily? The ATI Eyefinity is a six-head card. Here's a video of a machine running XPlane on four of them:

I think Microsoft has an upper limit of how many displays they will *support* using multimon, but I don't believe there's a theoretical one. Three of those in a machine, Bob's your uncle.

[visualbasicwizard]

I would think it would be more cost-efficient to build a rear-projection screen to do the slides.  You could build the squares and middle logo box over the screen, and use the software to just display the "slides". It would be tricky to get the throw just right, but it should work.

One thing I've always wondered, how the hell did they keep the wiring from the getting in the way of the projectors?

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'Bryce L.\' post=\'253074\' date=\'Dec 22 2010, 01:11 PM\']by replica, this guy meant a 100% duplicate of the original board. He even was mentioning about how he had someone who he thought would let him measure every inch of the original board. I asked him what his contact's name was, and the guy fudged. Therefore, I think he is full of buffalo chips...[/quote]
Yeah, believe me, the rest of us were way ahead of you on that one.  If the board still existed (which it sounds like he's trying to say), someone here would know about it.

[chris319]

Unless Bill Carruthers' heirs have been paying storage on it for 25? years, I'm sure it's been long disposed of.

I have thought that some day, when I have reached the end of the Internet and there is literally nothing to do, I might build a replica of the old mechanical Concentration board. At this point I think it would simply be an array of trilons which could be turned by hand. No way would I build the mechanism with motors, solenoids, base plates, controller and all. Hey, if Cristo can string bedsheets across a hillside, why not build a mock Concentration board as an objet d'art?