IMAX emulates PalmPilot software to power Oppenheimer’s 70 mm release
IMAX emulates PalmPilot software to power Oppenheimer’s 70 mm release
IMAX TikTok shows an emulated Palm PDA controlling Oppenheimer's 600-lb reel.
Now this is pretty cool. Who would have thought million dollar projectors would be controlled by a Palm PDA?
As someone who was working as a projectionist until recently, I'm not really surprised. The computer I used to schedule and allocate movies to the digital projectors was about 10yrs old and obsolete the day it came out (it had 2gb ram for vista, which had been upgraded at some point to windows 7).
The film projectors (which I was never taught how to use sadly, we didn't use them very often) looked like they were probably 20yrs old at least, and we had a couple extras from theaters that didn't reopen after the lockdown which we cannibalized for parts whenever something had to be replaced.
The palm pilot emulation for IMAX is probably necessary because most of the technology probably hasn't been updated since film started getting phased out in the mid-2000s. Kinda like how the military has emulation running emulation running software from the 70s-80s. If it ain't broke, don't fix it; except now it's "broke" because of how outdated it is, but there's nothing to replace it (I know the military situation is a bit different, but it's similar).
It's also cases of no one alive knows/remember how it works, there is no documentation and they don't want to pay millions and shut entire sites and operations down to reverse engineer it. Specially with the military.
neat! i wouldn't have thought it would work like this for theatres, thanks for the insight~
So we have to know now which emulator it was
I was using dosbox to keep our old business software alive until 2010 or so. Whatever works, I guess.