All Windows and all games? That''s unrealistic. The idea COULD work I suppose, but this is definately not the place to go to find someone to do it FOR you. Try approaching a research organization...

For what you would like to do, the printer port is pretty slow. You may want to look in using usb. And as for getting information from the game to trigger the solenoid that''s even more tricky. Most games have visual or audio cues for when you get hurt. You can''t get much more information then what you see or hear. I know some companies tried to make force feedback chairs which took the sound from the game and pounded it against your spine with a subwoofer. So when you got shot you felt the bass against your back, but they were not very successful. The only games that I can see you might beable to get some information from other then the audio and visual are games with force feedback support.

Good luck with your project.
~Wave

Well it is possible. There are quite a few hacks out there for CS and other games that determine when the player is hit (auto-aim/auto-turn-and-fire), but this will always be a very game/application specific. It is also not a great way to win friends with the developers of the game you are targeting. A program has to specifically be coded to send signals to the printer port. It does not just "happen". And looking at a file will not help you either. Resources such as sprites are loaded into memory at program/level start and accessed as needed. You really have no way of knowing when a certain sprite is being accessed and you certainly won''t find anything useful looking at a sprite file. The way these third party devices, such VR head mount displays, trackers, etc, get supported in games is for the device developer to provide the game developers with an application interface so they can write code that will specifically support the device. You will notice that the devices come with a list of supported games. Sometimes the list is long, sometimes it is short, it just depends on whether the developers wanted to write extra code to support the device. Good luck.

Like I said, that just will not work. Reading from disk is incredibly slow. Games load all resources such as sprites into memory, usually before the level starts. That''s what that LOADING... screen is for in many games. While you are sitting there staring at the screen, the game is furiously loading resources like sprites, models and audio into memory so it can get to them quickly once the game begins. You could try something like look at the area of the screen where you know the sprite will appear and look at the color of the pixels there. If it turns red in an area, you have a good idea that a shot may have hit. The only problem is, the pixels can change color for other reasons as well, so you get false positives. There is really no elegant hack solution. That is why I mentioned how other devices get support (it is specifically written in by the game developers).