Hello Everyone.. I am new here as well. I found the board today and after reading a few of the threads I decided it was time to register.
A GREAT board here.
As for the HOG 3 PC. We received the disc for the HOG 3 PC when we purchased our rental IPC a few years ago. I have no idea if it has a demo mode or not, but ours runs perfectly
thru the computer with no problems.
But, one of the first problems you have here is that you are using Norton.. haha.. PLEASE get the crap off your computer as fast as you can to free up a tremendous amount of resources. AVG Free for Virii protection and Zonealarm for firewall.. Both free and work amazingly well.
As for the USB-DMX.. I have ventured into building them about a year and a half ago from super cheap to getting the proper chipsets for the great products that even have
RDM capabilities.. Enntec makes some decent ones in their higher range models as you were mentioning. The biggest thing about using your own (or somebody else's)
dongle is that most of those cheap ones out there put most of the performance on the computer instead of on the
dongle. I honestly cannot for the life of me remember the company that did it over in UK that you could buy the kit or have them
build the kit. It was a cheesy website, but after looking at the schematics it was perfectly done. It put **** near most of the strain on the
dongle itself. The problem with cheap
ole ones is that your computer could probably handle it if you were running a bunch of conventionals, but if you started throwing alot of movers on there your average computer is not going to be able to handle it. It will cause your cues to
lag and cause an overall laggy performance that's not quite up to
par.
I can't remember the good chip that goes inside of the good units, its been awhile since I have researched it, but Enntec is not to shabby when it comes to their dongles, but there are better ones out there (Not to slam Enntec, they have great higher end products). Here at our company we sell some widgets here and there because its proven, its a quality High End product and quality is what people want. Alot of people don't want to test using off-brand products with their consoles that cost them a pretty penny. To your average student or person that wants to run a free PC lighting program and say, use WSIWYG to practice their lighting design, they don't always have the money for the
widget.
Man.. I am going to try and figure out that other site. Their product was superior to Enntec's (strictly from viewing the schematics and the chipsets that they used) and I want to say it was only about $230..
-Shawn
www.theatreworks.com
EDIT: Had a few words without spaces between them.. corrected those.