RE: Cinemenu results...(Zonn?)

G'day Paul (and folks),

I'm reminded of a similar situation of trying to run Speed Freak code on
a standard Cinematronics motherboard. In that case, only the
"Vectorbeam" logo is displayed, and as I remember, the mother board is
constantly being reset? Again, I'm suffering from vague memories (and
having my collection in storage for way too long)...so I can't be sure.

Did you see the LED flickering on the motherboard, Clay? (Paul's
original program never turned the LED off, so that might be the case
this time...then it'd be pretty hard to spot the resetting.)

               Steven S Ozdemir
               sso@plpt.com (my company renamed itself in Feb)
               sso@dsc.com (good for a few more months)
               ozdemir@xenon.stanford.edu (permanent...weekly)

ps - Now what's this about charging $100 for strings, Paul? 8^) 8^) 8^)

>----------
>From: Paul Kahler[SMTP:phkahler@Oakland.edu]
>Sent: Thursday, March 26, 1998 10:02 AM
>To: vectorlist@spies.com
>Cc: Paul Kahler
>Subject: Re: Cinemenu results...(Zonn?)
>
>Zonn could you offer a suggestion?
>
>Clay wrote:
>> Fired up Paul's menu code on real Cinematronics hardware last night.
>> Pretty close.
>>
>> What I get is a mostly blank screen with (basically):
>>
>> * CINEMATP
>>
>> across the top.
>>
>> The asterisk is a little funky looking-- three lines, but they don't all
>> cross at the center. The top left of the "C" doesn't quite match up.
>> The rest of the letters look nice. (The N and M in particular-- nice
>> diagonal lines. Maybe I like the Cinematronics vector generator more
>> than I thought. ;-) There is a faint line connecting the bottom of the
>> "C" to the top right of the "E".
>
>First of all, the correct dispay would be:
>
>* CINEMATRONICS *
>
> SELECT
> ARMOR ATTACK
>
> MULTIGAME
>
>I'm not sure why some of the letters would draw and others not. All I can
>guess is that the watchdog is causing it to reset and start over before
>the first word is even done (middle of the letter R). I just checked Zonn's
>docs on the watchdog (our emulator doesn't have it) and he says it runs at
>76 Hz. I thought it was ~38Hz and I don't see how it could expire before
>the first word (even at 76Hz). Ya, my font is quite large but still...
>One other possibility is that something strange is going on with the
>Normalize instruction (LLT is Zonn speak). Perhaps I accidently slipped
>a zero-length line in the letter R by accident - That should hang the
>CPU and reset it.
>
>As for the asterisk, it should be 4 lines.. I was afraid I may start drawing
>text before the beam reached the beginning of the string, this may be a
>symptom. You'd know for sure if there were more text with the first letter
>of each string slightly messed up.
>
>> I couldn't try any controls (my CPU seems to have input problems).
>
>The game name is the only thing that changes, and since it's not being
>shown, you couldn't tell. Also, the controls are checked after all the
>text is drawn so if it's reseting it will never check them anyway.
>
>I'll have a look at my font data and the watchdog circuit tonight and
>try to get an update out tomorrow. If you're feeling ambitious, you
>can change the R to another letter - That string is at $100.
>
>Thanks, I'll try again!
>--
> ___ __ _ _ _
>| \ / \ | | | || | phkahler@oakland.edu Engineer/Programmer
>| _/| || || |_| || |__ " What makes someone care so much?
>|_| |_||_| \___/ |____) for things another man can just ignore. " -S.H.
>
Received on Thu Mar 26 10:22:41 1998