CyberMaxxII Image, link to LCD Project main page
Acknowledgements

updated Monday, July 1, 2002

 Site designed by Philip G. Stewart, Delectra Jouet
pstewart@gwi.net
Julie S. Porter has done the most to get the LCDs working. She found a good manufacturer for our PC boards, did the tough metric work to make PC boards that would fit the chips we used, built several test bench devices to support LCD work, and contributed immensely in design wisdom, not to mention encouragement for the project. She has shown a great knack for finding solutions and getting things to work. Without Julie, this project would not have happened in a timely way at all.

Nate Caine provided the original Cybermaxx reverse engineering Web site at Halted Specialties, following an extensive analysis he performed on the system. He also helped immensely in our work on the Cybermaxx video system, taking the time to answer my emails in detail, at times even when I did not pose my questions in terms an engineer would.

In addition to providing the crucial overview of the Cybermaxx VR system, Nate has helped us to understand the logic control signals the LCDs use, the timing of the back light control pulse, and a number of idiosyncracies in the system we would not have discovered without his groundbreaking work.

From inspecting the Cybermaxx LCD under a microscope to putting his first-rate technical explanations on the Web, Nate's work has been essential to the project.

Kristian Bognaes did some of the very hard early work, creating a PC board from scratch to mount the MN83803 driver chips, and contributed extensive design insight.

Gordon Ledford did extensive experimentation with the LCD backlights to supplement the scanty information originally provided in their data sheets. His systematic and meticulous data collection helped very early on in the project.

Jep Holtrop kindly supplied a PDF of the MN83803AK manual, without which this Web site would be much less useful, and without which a lot of insights would just not have arisen.

Tom Cumming at ThinkThink in the Silicon Valley supplied a hardcopy MN83803AK manual, very similar to what Jep Holtrop found and similarly valuable. Tom has also offered some system design ideas for emulating the MN83803AK with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

Arthur Zwern, President of the General Reality Company, kindly supplied schematics, technical drawings, and parts lists from the Cybermaxx system, which have been of great help in the reverse engineering process.

Petros Stamatogiannakis enhanced the photocopies Arthur Zwern passed on to us, making them easy to read and distribute electronically. Anyone needing diagrams of the Cybermaxx head-tracking sensor interfaces can thank Petros for making these documents legible.

Eric Smith, a contractor who worked on the original Cybermaxx head-tilt tracking software, has been particularly helpful to folks trying to understand the head tracking system, and has provided useful insights and much-needed encouragement with the project.

Daniel Heckenberg supplied photos of the Cybermaxx II VR helm, and contributed extensively to discussions about system design using the Sharp video processing chips.

Sharp Microelectronics's technical folks in New Jersey have provided very kind and timely help, supplying us with data sheets for the IR3Y05 and IR3Y15 integrated circuits. Their professionalism and excellent assistance has earned Sharp my brand loyalty.

The folks at Eio.com have generously supplied Web space for technical discussions concerning the Cybermaxx LCDs, and continue to host Web-based forums in a variety of electronic subjects. My hat is off to them for putting together a fun and useful Web site to supplement their online store.

Marc Cygnus, a software engineer from Victormaxx, supplied insights about the integrated circuits used to drive the LCDs, and some interesting photos of LCD demo boards discarded by Victormaxx when they got out of the consumer electronics business-- which turn out to be for the same LCDs used in the Forte VFX-1, apparently.

Dr. Susan L. Garfinkel has provided invaluable help and feedback on Web site design and has kindly read and critiqued the technical writing for this Web site, which in its early drafts was not a task for the faint of heart!

A number of other correspondents have helped with useful insights. Please accept my apologies if you have helped with the project and have been left out of this list; it is a preliminary upload for the Web site, to be updated when time allows.