Re: Short term plans (was RE: list charter)

From: Clay Cowgill <clay_at_supra.com>
Date: Tue May 06 1997 - 21:10:54 EDT

>I for one would rather all the games be made available as they're cracked,
>I'm not really that interested in a front end menu system. I'd prefer just
>to plug the game in and *poof* Tac/Scan just like the Arcades.

The only "gotcha" there is that I've noticed that the big card edge
connectors on my "test" G-80 system are already showing signs of wear in
the slots that I frequently plug/unplug cards into. (Not a show stopper,
but something to consider-- they might not be the best "high volume"
insertion/removal connectors...)

>This is *NOT* to say anything against a menu! It's just that I've gone
>through a lot of effort to collect games with all the artwork intact, 99% of
>my games have a dedicated cabinet (and reside at friends' houses throughout
>the county! Hey I live in a condo!)

That's right-- you better not be talk'n bad `bout my menu system! ;-)

For what it's worth, the menu system should boot to whatever "game 0" is--
for example Star Trek. Unless you press and hold P1 start and P2 start at
the same time, you wouldn't see the menu. I thought about putting a little
serial NOVRAM out in memory to store the "current" boot game, but that
actually complicates things a bit. (Weak pulldowns will insure that image
0 always starts at boot time, since it's actually the game's ROM from
0x0000-0x7ff that's executing at powerup time... The menu code lives up in
0xF000 and is only called by the NMI vector.)

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
Received on Tue May 6 17:09:36 1997

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