Re: Anyone using PartyGUI on TV with Pronto?

I will try to help you but you probably will need more help than mine.

To make the Pronto control your PC you have two choices. Mouse mode Or general IR recognition. Philips makes an IR keyboard/mouse that comes with a little IR receiver that plugs into the keyboard and mouse ports. It replaces your regular mouse and keyboard. The receiver can be used on just a mouse port as a second mouse (serial) with your old keyboard and mouse connected. The IR receiver understands mouse mode from the Pronto. Jack Schultz at www.prontoedit.com can probably help you find out where you can get a Philips IR keyboard unit. He gave me one as a gift for helping with the Pronto, however I sold mine.

To do General IR recognition you need a device that connects to a PC and recognizes IR patterns, compares them against known patterns and tells you which pattern was seen, or decodes the pattern down to devicecode/keycode.. The Slinke can do this (the former) in theory but I do not know if Colby has this working well or not. Others at this BBS may be able to advise you on that.

An alternate approach (the one I have used for over 2 years) is to buy a device which accepts IR and gives the data to a PC on a serial (Com) port. The device I use is called the NECIR2PC and is made by a company at www.customremote.com. It costs about $40. It will recognize only NEC IR code and gives the PC the device and key numbers which is all you need. It in effect tells you which Pronto key (or touch screen button) was pressed. You now need a program which is watching the serial port on the PC and when it gets a code telling it what Pronto button was touched, it will do what is necessary. Such a program is easy to write in something like Visual Basic, IF you are a programmer. Getting NEC patterns for the Pronto is easy, I can supply all you might want.

Now the program has to talk to PartyGui. It can talk directly to CDJ through the slinke server which is what I do. To talk to PartyGUI that program needs to provide a mechanism to do so. It can talk through the Slinke Server(I think, but that might not yet be possible, maybe Colby will chime in), it can be dealt with in one direction (the program talks to PartyGui by sending it Keystrokes using Visual Basic SENDKEYS commands. PartyGUI could be enhanced by the Auther to allow DDE or OLE and accept commands from other programs to control it. That would require the author of PartyGui to do some work.