RE: Tech:Asteroids

> NonExistant on the scope...
>
Ahh, I misunderstood your first message then. The rest of the game
appears OK though, yes? ROMs checksum OK with the 9010? 10E1 for -02's
program area... (Yes, I remember the checksum of Asteroids ROMs on a
Fluke 9010... My brain's very strange about what it does and doesn't
recall sometimes...:-)

> That was my thought, so I put in one of my test roms, no show, I then
> blasted a new one just in case... No good. :-(
>
Did you check the program ROMs? It's possible that the program ROMs are
loading a bad starting address for the vector generator test pattern...
I suppose you could also have a bad counter in the Vector Generator
program counter-- mabe it can't "see" page zero in the VROM or
something? (odd...)

> I've been using a 100mhz scope, I would have thought would have seen
> at least a persistance trace, but no.. But then again if I isolate it,
> it
> crashes
> so I must be doing something..
>
Yeah, I can see it on a 100Mhz digital palm-scope, but it's fairly
infrequent when the game is running-- pretty narrow pulse too...

> BTW: I did but the bugger on the fluke9010 and compared it with a
> known
> good board, and she passes just fine.. so its got to be in the vector
> generator section somewhere.... Hum... I wonder If I can write a
> test pattern thats simple to exercise each line.... Anyone ever mess
> with
> coding on the 9010 ?
>
I wrote a lot of 9010 stuff on and off over the last year. (except I
have a bad habit of not labeling tapes and writing over programs...)
You could probably just write some vector list commands to the Vector
RAM, and then load a tiny little program in the CPU RAM that tells the
VG to draw and wait to finish, then draw again. In theory whatever
commands are in the VRAM get executed by doing that, so you could either
do subroutine calls into the VROM and see what's working, OR you could
copy the first 128 bytes (or whatever it is) from the Vector ROM into
the VRAM with the Fluke and jump to it-- make sure you get the pattern
on the screen...

-Clay
Received on Fri Feb 12 15:24:29 1999