I had the idea of making a simple stock market trainer for daytrading. The idea is you see a random day-graph "unrolling" at a predefined pace. So the program has a database of historical daily graphs (in png picture format) of some stock and the player has a buy and a sell button. The goal is then to make as much money per day as possible.
I would like to use png pictures (or bmp if i convert them first) because i know where to get them. You have to pay for detailed historical price data and I'm not willing to do that. Also the program would have to read values from the pictures, here's a sample:
http://i37.tinypic.com/2ebzxpw.png
Im thinking it shouldnt be impossible to read values from it. The data is always the black line, so I have to remove the thin black frame in all pictures. Then do something like "if pixel = black" then read value. The numbers on the y-axis could probably also be read, converting the pixel-patterns into numbers. However I don't know how to do all this. I would need some picture library which handles bmp or png pics. Something which could read the color of individual pixels and "roll a blanket" off the graphs, which would involve displaying a picture over an existing one or simply making temporary pictures for each clock tick and showing these one by one. Heres also a sample of how i think the program would work:
http://i39.tinypic.com/29giw7l.jpg