Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="serial malcontent"]Let me try answering this in order of relevance to you. Brace for screwups now. [quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]My gaming laptop can't run Road Redemption very well. Am I a possible future customer??[/quote] Yeah. If you bought one and didn't hate it, I'd feel like my job was done. [quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]It's fine. I usually have to put a laptop in a bin when it gets too old to run anything. So why not upgrade it? If you can figure out a way to nicely get the cables inside the laptop then you're really onto something.[/quote] This is a (cancelled?) siemens (hahahaha, wait till MM gets a load of this brand name) product for doing just this kind of thing, except less powerful. It has one cable that plugs into the laptop and a power cable you plug into a wall outlet: <img src=http://img.hexus.net/v2/news/fujitsu/amilo-graphicsbooster.jpg> So no rat's nest of cables. Not available on the market as far as I've found, possibly the hardware equivalent of vaporware. This is a box without a graphics card some Singaporeans are selling for $200 plus shipping. You have to spend more on the graphics card and a matching PSU yourself, have fun paying up to $800 for it to work: <img src=http://www.villageinstruments.com/vi_files//img/products/ViDock34.jpg> No cable mess there either though. We think we can do that with included cards and power supplies and shit for a lot less, like a few hundred total and even less if you want us to not include a graphics card. And it works with modern USB cables, so the two year old gaming laptop my friend has had to bin because the graphics card is too slow but everything else in it is still up to par might not cost him $1500 to replace now if he wants mobile gaming when he doesn't have desktop access for weeks. And it won't burn his lap, or require a stupid 30 dollar laptop cooling fan that breaks in three weeks. Still think I might be onto something? I have a lot of moments when I think it's retarded. [quote]Is USB 3.0 a requirement? I guess it's the easiest way to make it happen, yeah.[/quote] So these external video card hookups fall into two categories as far as I'm concerned: ready made products that are only powerful enough to run powerpoint or transfer shit to external monitors that corporate stiffs use to give powerpoint presentations from work laptops, and cobbled together cable mazes for actual graphics cards that can run games, do modeling that an engineer or architect might use, do 3d media arts shit, etc. The former work on usb and thus works with more or less every laptop that anyone would be likely to have right now. The latter work on thunderbolt ports (only some macs) and the 34mm PCI express card ports on older laptops (my five year old dell studio laptop has one such port). Bringing the solution from a subset of a subset of laptops to anything that has a usb 3.0 port is a big deal, but by no means the only way to fly. It's just that if we want to maximize potential customers we gotta make it easy for them to use our shit. It's actually slightly harder to make it happen that way, but if we can get it to work without some huge electronics firm eating into our bottom line with licensing fees that'd be a pretty great accomplishment. [/quote](My bin of laptops are for shit like how you can hook a device up that emulates an Atari 800 or whatever.) The only real downside I see is that you may be called on for eternal tech support from your customers. Like, you touched it last and now something is broken, I demand you fix it.[/quote] The design is gonna be pretty much one-button by base necessity, but yeah, that's what best buy protection plan style bullshit is for. We can sell tech support if we have to, otherwise you just turn it off and on again. We may already be selling tech support because we might have to go with open source drivers for the device because of legal structure, which could mean that we sell the hardware but include a separate charge for tech support because you can install open source code and charge fo it as a service apparently, so why not let open source programmers upgrade the code for us (I have access to a lawyer that a friend keeps on retainer who's gonna inform me of whether this is monumentally stupid, I expect it is but we'll see if I am by some miracle wrong about this).[/quote]