Playing Games Remotely...

[poogy]

Lo,

I've been staying recently in an hotel that offered PS2 games in the room, selecting them from the TV on demand system...

There was no PS2 in the room and the games were played remotely.

I wonder if I can achieve a similar functionality with the xbox. Have one at home and allow the kids to play from their rooms....

Any ideas will be appreciated.

BR

 

[Martin C]

I used to work for a major media company that supplied this very service to a famous chain of hotels (Paris anyone??).

The technology to do this is pretty expensive and not at all worth thinking about on a home level.

Trust me on this one ....

Martin

 

[poogy]

Thanks.

Must be some sort of "managment" application running in the setop box in the room which delivers the commands to the system...

 

[Martin C]

It's actually a little more to it.

There's a special controller board in the TV (with a special socket for a joypad as well as an RF socket).

The head-end (where all the channels are fed from) has a separate controller unit, where a number of PS2s are sat with specific games.

If there are 4 games available from the room for instance and it's a fairly large hotel, they wouldn't expect more than 3-4 people to play the same game at once so there's 16 PS2s in the rack. The output feeds and joypads go into separate cards into the controller unit and the I/O is controlled by a separate unit. Once you activate the game, it sends the reset command to the PS2 and all functions from the joypad are signalled through the RF to the controller board. The resulting output is transmitted back to the TV on a designated RF channel.

I'll stop there before I send you to sleep!

Martin