Bluetooth Rebroadcasting
Have I mentioned my Bluetooth Rebroadcasting idea? I was in the bathroom this morning doing my business, playing FIFA 2004 on my N-Gage "Classic" and thinking to myself that it would be so great if I could play head-to-head against some of the other N-Gage owners that I know right then and there.
The problem is that 1) I was in the bathroom at 8 in the morning and 2) everyone I know that owns an N-Gage - Ewan, Frank, JimH - all live in Europe. That's when I remembered the inkling of an idea that I had months ago when I first bought my N-Gage: PC-based Bluetooth Rebroadcasting over TCP/IP. The idea is simple in theory. You and a friend run an application on your Bluetooth-enabled PC that streams the data received over Bluetooth from your N-Gage to a friend's computer which passes it on to their N-Gage, and vice versa.
Now, I'm sure there's a million details in the implementation. Is the latency over TCP/IP so bad as to screw up the games? Maybe. Is it possible for your PC to mimic an N-Gage over Bluetooth enough to even try this sort of thing, or will it get hung up by the various profiles and unique identifiers? (When I scan for other devices to play against, the N-Gage seems to detect everything, so this may not be an issue). I'm thinking that once you connect two BT devices, they just basically communicate over some sort of sockets protocol, but maybe there's more magic in there that I don't know about. My entire low-level understanding of Bluetooth comes from JSR-82, which may or may not be a good indicator of the underlying tech.
Anyways, if you want to, uhmm, go ahead and uhmm, just you know, code that up and send it over. That'd be great. Thaaaanks...
And remember Friday is Hawaiian Shirt Day...
-Russ