Anyone know if the Neo Car wired remote can be hacked to work with the emeg? That sure would be a nice solution for mounting the empeg in the glove-box - for those of us that don't want to rip out our factory stereo.

- trs

..and an excellent theft deterrent.

hmmm, nice for my backseat
I'd be interested if it could...

Yeah - I think it could be cool for a lot of applications, but I wouldn't know where to start with it. The other nice thing about it is that, unlike the VFD displays, you don't have to order in bulk - and they aren't that expensive. I saw it listed for $65 on one site. Of course, I'm not sure if they're actually shipping them, but...

I'm actually more interested to see if a Game Boy Advance could be hacked to interface with the empeg.

320x240x15bit display, ARM based, can be obtained for ~$100. I'm thinking that this could conceivably make a useful GPSapp display.

I had the same thought last week when I saw a write up about the new GBA.
I think it would make an excellent "satellite" display for a trunk/under seat mounted empeg.

Not sure on the interface on the new GBA though, from previous versions it uses some sort of weird not-serial interface, which a small micro could no doubt talk to.

BTW: How bright is the screen in the new GBA in sunlight? Seemed to me to be the major drawback with the original GBA, but I would expect that to be removed this time round.
[hopefully].

Not sure about screen brightness. I've been looking at GBA hacking sites, and it certainly has potential. There seems to be a plethora of software tools available for creating GBA apps, and it is supported by gcc. It is very limited on RAM though, so a full blown linux kernel is probably out of the question

The 'link' port can be configured to be like a standard RS232 UART, with a 115k maximum baud rate. But it may be more useful to use it in 'Normal SIO mode' which can be either 256kbits/s across a cable or 2.5Mbits/s if the device is local. My thinking is that a device could do an ethernet<->SIO conversion, which would provide enough bandwidth for a remote display.

With 38400 pixels, mimicing the empeg's 2 bit color would allow for ~4 updates/second on the slower rate, or ~32F/s on the higher rate. Obviously, if higher color palettes were desired then those rates would drop. But for GPSapp use, 8bit color at 1F/s (lower rate) would be fine - most receivers don't report position more than 1/s anyway.

It may be that we can get even faster access via the cartridge port and some form of DMA. I haven't found much about this yet.