"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
Tim Mitchell writes:
Well it's kind of DIY

I am trying to make a simple message display system which has a number
of video monitors run from the TV-out of a PC.

I was convinced someone must supply some simple software to run on the
PC to actually output the messages, but though I have googled long and
hard, I can't find anything.

Powerpoint would possibly be OK, but I was looking for something simpler
- really just a few pages of straight text display. With a bit of time I
could write something in visual basic, but it seems a shame to reinvent
something which already exists. Anyone know of anything to do this?

There's certainly someone who produces software to do this
on a Solaris sparc system (I don't remember the name, but
could probably find out). However, situation is probably
slightly different from yours, as it's done by having some
30 or more video cards in the system, and each can be
displaying something completely different. Typically used
for multi-panel display walls, flight simulators, etc.

--
Andrew Gabriel

For a non DIY option - http://www.oview.co.uk/marquee.htm - it is a $15
shareware package scrolling screensaver that reads its messages from a text
file, so the user would only have to know how to edit a message in notepad
and then set the srreensaver running.

A more DIY option would be to use a web page with a DHTML or java script to
produce the scrolling text. There are loads of scripts out there, some free,
some commercial [
http://www.codejunction.com/scripts/...ext-scrolling] The script
could read the text from a file. If the web page has a Meta-refresh tag you
can set it to reload itself every five minutes or so, and you could put the
source file somewhere on the network - update the source file and the
message will update. The display PC then runs a web browser in 'kiosk mode.
An added bonus of this approach is that you can incorporate other web
content, ie logos, web cams, cricket scores etc without much effort. The
down side is that any self respecting student will hack into the system
within minutes to cancel the boring lectures!

Andy M