I am getting depressed though. I've been testin the new Leo Kiosk here at home with the computer that Enterprise for Education shipped here. It's a nice little Pentium 4 box running at 2.5 GHz with a 17 inch LCD monitor and a 15 inch touch screen. So, my windoze box is only a POS 500MHz. So i've been testing enough, and now i realize that the software that i built is indeed VERY stable and has no problem running for days or weeks at a time. I've not had any chance to run the thing for months yet, but i'll put my money down that it will be able to take it. So i stopped testing and have been making some updates to the software. Enterprise wants a few little additions that are actually cool. They want basic stats. How long has the thing been running and in that time how many hazards have been displayed. Then show average play level and average score for each hazard. So, hazard 3 was played 45 times in one day by 3rd graders and on average they got the hazard right on the 2nd try. Its actually cool, but i have not been running the kiosk all around the clock anymore, so now i've started to use the box just as another one of my systems. Ok, this is where i am getting depressed. Its by far the fastest thing i have in my office. My OSX boxes are much more friendly, but lets be honest here. There are not many games made for Macs. This new win box has a Radeon card in it too, so i've installed all the games ive got on it. I've been playing Medal of Honor at full rez and a fuckin great frame rate.
I'm going to have to give it back.
That's what pisses me off. This box is going to end up in Florida in a museum. Well, maybe i can get enterprise to just buy me one to work with here. I'll ask em tomorrow.
BUT the question came up last week if we could cut the cost of the Kiosk, and maybe use a DVD format instead of a computer. I looked into it and found out that there are a few professional grade DVD players that have interface ports that will work with touch screen monitors. So that's a option. I could translate the entire interactive into a DVD menu format and then pop it into a kiosk that just has a DVD player in it. We'd not be able to do some of the more complicated operations, but we would be able to almost guarantee uptime. no crashes, no power problems, just turn the bitch off at night and turn it on in the morning. Well now i just gotta figure out how long it would take to build the DVD version. From the nightmare stories from DVCC, i have a feeling that a elaborate menu system like this might be a lot more trouble than its worth.
