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From reading the specifications for the protocol it looks like the display is semi intelligent and is made specifically for their MP3 player. It's not a proper bitmap display, there are limitations on what you can display. You tell it pretty much what text and preset icons to display.

You could reprogram the display to allow full control but it would involve developing your own firmware for it.

If this was interfaced with the empeg then it wouldn't mirror what is shown on the real empeg display. But if you're okay with it just displaying the basic information then I don't see any problem with implementing this.

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(Somehow I never saw this messages has having any 'new' messages in it until now. Apologies. For anyone who cares. )

When I first heard of the display, I thought it was a simple serial device. All I would use it for, personally, would be to mount it in the back so ther back-seat driver could know what he's listening to. (I didn't know it even had a control on it.)

It wouldn't be too hard sending out data via the serial port, the only downside is that nothing else could use the serial port when it's in use. (Obviously...) Now, translating dot-specific data to serial (I haven't read the sheets yet, just SWAG'n at the moment.) would be rather difficult (read: take much CPU time, depending on type of visual. In theory, static images shouldn't be that hard, allowing a user to choose a font and what data to display on the screen, then let the 'visual' program 'draw' the screen at each song change.
The hard parts, for me, would be knowing when the song changed, and grabbing the info from the database on the current playing song. (And maybe next, etc.)
I like the display's looks, tho. With the knob and curves, it almost looks like a smaller Empeg, and it fits in with the dash setup of my Mini Cooper wonderfully. Heh.

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We're pretty much stuck with the 3 shades we've currently got. It's a limitation of the VFD used. I think somebody tried a few of the other shades and found there was one more that worked okay.

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Pretty much, yeah. Even on the current-day pinball games (well, save for WMS's "Pinball 2000", but that's a different story.) they used displays similar to the empeg, but larger 'dots' - On, Off, and two shades of gray. Images were stored all on an EEPROM as (basically) two two-bit images, then combined and put on the 'screen'. I had friends who modified the hardware to make the 'grays' stand out from each other better because the timing difference between the two made it hard to tell them apart.

Mike.