LASER SHOW SOFTWARE
There is a growing number of programs available for the hobby laser show enthusiast. I started out with this when there were only a couple of affordable (to me) programs available. The choices were either very expensive commercial software, or free programs for the Amiga computer, and very little, that I knew of, in between. I searched the internet extensively and found two free programs that I settled with for my beginning with this laser show hobby. The first two detail what software I have used and my experiences with it.
Pangolin Laser Show Designer 1000
Pangolin LSD 1000 for Amiga
Pangolin is a company that has produced professional laser show software for many years. Laser Show Designer (LSD 1000), a screen shot shown here, was their first entry into the professional software market, and was designed to run on a Commodore Amiga 500 computer. Pangolin released this software free of charge to laser hobbyists years ago, and when I discovered it I was very excited and downloaded it right away. It took a few days of playing with it to get a feel for how it worked, but eventually I was producing animations for my laser scanners I had just received. To my disappointment the scanners, which were kit style SVS units (see Laser Show Hardware page) did not seem to work at all. After much research and many forum conversations I was able to get them tuned to an acceptable level and could see that they were not quite up to the task of what I had seen in Laserium shows. Never the less, I plugged along and produced my first "graphical" laser show for my family and friends for our New Year's Eve party back in the late '90's.
LaserMax
Lasermax, shown here, is another program for the Amiga 500 that I came across. It is less a laser show design program and more a Lissajous generator sample scanner. It has quite a few presets available and is also customizable. It's been quite a while since I have used this software so I don't remember the details of its operation. On thing I do remember is that it is preset to display PAL (European standard video format) video on the monitor instead of NTSC (American standard video format). The Amiga video format must be changed to PAL to make use of this software. Once configured properly, this software was really fun to experiment with and use. Just click a 'button' and the pattern is instantly displayed by the laser scanner. Play with the setting just below the laser display window to tune the various parameters controlling the scan. Even though I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to make this software work I felt it was well worth the effort.
iShow
Lately there is a little more in the way of hobby oriented laser show software and hardware, at least as far as what might be considered hobby level cost. Shown here, iShow is an offering from China (available on eBay) that includes a CD with the laser show software, a hardware interface, power supply, and cables. It uses the standard ILDA 25 pin connector for connection to a laser projector.
Click HERE to see software screenshots
Click HERE to see software screenshots