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Camera App--It's happening -- I'm doing it with my partner

Posted By: phil simborg
Date: Saturday, 25 July 2015, at 2:18 p.m.

My partner and I have been working on this for several months and we have solved most of the problems with the dice, pattern recognition, stacking of checkers etc. We have people playing all day long on 15 boards testing the software, which beeps if there is an illegal move, to make sure that the moves and rolls get recorded instantly and correctly into XG. We are working out the bugs and expect to have beta version out for testing before the end of the year...we hope sooner but you never know with this kind of stuff.

My partner is a perfectionist, and refuses to release anything that isn't perfect, and there are plusses and minuses to that. When I worked with Xavier on his initial release of XG, the first version had plenty of errors and bugs, but with the help of the beta testers (me, Mochy and Neil) we caught most of them, but to this day there are still things to improve in XG. So I am pushing to come out with a version to test sooner and let our beta testers help us perfect both the hardware and the software.

And you won't have to have a computer sitting next to the board to make it happen, as it can also go into a flash drive (which will be in the clock that will be a part of the product) and simply insert the flash drive into your computer and it all downloads into XG.

I can't tell you a lot more right now except to say that we are doing it and it works. We have top, professional engineers designing and developing the camera, stand, clock, and software to make it a reality, and the days of transcribing matches manually will soon come to an end.

Of course, the other beauty of this is that it can also be simulcast on streaming along with the actual board, without having a person doing the transcription.

After working on this for several months I can tell you why it has taken so long to perfect this product....it takes a lot of high-level expertise and engineering and hours of testing that is simply not economically practical given the potential income from the backgammon community, and we may never realize a profit from this effort. It is more of a labor of love and because we know it will be wonderful for the game to have such a product available to all (not just for match play, but for money play and chouettes as well).

I'm having fun trying to come up with a name for the product. I am thinking of XG Transcription or XG Transcriber or something like that. (I have been in close communication with Xavier from the beginning and have his permission to do this with his wonderful software.)

Once it comes out, I will personally guarantee the software and hardware and it will work and work well, or you won't see it.

All comments and suggestions and feedback are welcome. I have been bursting at the seams to announce this for some time but I have waited until this time as we now know that it works and it will become a reality....just a matter of how soon we can have it perfect and how soon we can source the manufacturing of the various parts...fortunately my partner and his company have personnel with much experience in production of both software and hardware and we will make it happen.

I know others have talked about doing this and are working on this but so far no one has succeed, but we have, and we will be bringing this to the backgammon world in the near future.

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