Serious use of your screen saver
 

I love your product, and want to set up a "virtual aquarium" that runs continuously (and does nothing but run your app) in a nursing home, for what I think will be exceptional therapeutic effects.

Obviously, I want to base it on your product, but I'm wondering if you have experience or recommendations about hooking up a plasma screen (or something else) to run it? Is there a
way without buying a DVD (which is OK, I'm just asking)? Or a PC?

Thanks,
Bill

On a plasma screen, the 720 x 480 resolution of the DVD will look really poor. And if you are spending the money on a plasma screen, it's worth dropping ~$450 for a small computer to be built to run the Aquarium full-time at 1280 x 720.

If you have any questions about how to configure this system, feel free to ask!

I agree with Morgan. It will look so real you'll want to feed them. ;)

It's very common to see the Aquarium running on Plasma displays in lobbies and waiting-rooms. There shouldn't be any need to buy a new computer just to run the Aquarium. Just about any old Pentium-class computer with a halfway decent video card would be perfectly suitable. So if you know anyone who is upgrading, see if you can get their old computer and try it out. Most of the folks on this Forum are into state-of-the-art machines which will run the Aquarium at over 100 frames per second, but you would still get excellent results using a 5-year-old $15 video card at 30 frames-per-second.

Make sure you download the 2.01 version and use the Widescreen feature.

There you go. You just heard that from the Boss. :TU:

Mini-ATX Case - $28.50
52x CD-ROM drive - $15
40Gb 8mb 7200RPM hard drive - $58.50
256MB RAM - $41
Micro ATX nforce2 Ultra 400 motherboard - $53
Athlon XP 2000+ CPU - $64
ATI Radeon 9600XT video card - $129
Windows XP Home SP2 - $94

Total - $483

Yeah, it's way more than needed, but it'll also run Sharks and GA no problem, and with AA too... Honestly I'd go with 512MB RAM just because, but that's me... Also, the 9600XT can use ATI's component adapter in case you get a display that can't accept VGA or DVI natively... Lastly, cost doesn't include a mouse or keyboard since you won't really need to keep them hooked up to it after it's up and running... I guess you could ditch the CD-ROM as well using the same logic...

Couldn't you just purchase Marine Aquarium DVD edition and run it on a DVD player to a Plasma screen? Or is the quality going to suffer?

The quality is nowhere near that of a computer output at 1280x768, and the DVD is not widescreen.

DVD (this particular one) = 640 x 480 not widescreen
Aquarium on plasma = 1280 x 720 widescreen and you can change the fish

Ah right...forgot about the MA2 MD version. I actually put in the DVD version of the aquarium (bought just recently) into the DVD player and found out that the quality is nowhere near what the computer version is. And of course the fact that you can't customize the aquarium like you can on the computer.

davidiq, - The Aquarium DVD was discussed in some detail on this thread. :)