RE: PC Vector generator card... (and ESB update)

> Sounds Cool!!
>
> Can you drive it synchronously? The Cinematronics games do not have a
> vector
> generator, each vector is drawn in software (like the Vectrex), and at
> least one
> game, Space War, uses software timing to redraw the center star
> vectors to give
> it the appearance of variable intensity vectors.
>
Hmmmmm. I think I see what you mean. You could probably just have the
DSP sit there in a busy-loop watching for new values to appear from the
PC and grab 'em as soon as they show up.

The good part is that the design is effectively "soft". The hardware is
just the DSP and the D/A's so you can actually change how it works long
after the hardware is working... As long as the game doesn't display
more than about 4000 vectors at once you could just treat data RAM as a
line-list. (or whatever you can fit in about 32K bytes of RAM.) Render
a "frame" into the list and let the DSP draw it. This kind-of imposes a
"frame rate" on a variable-speed system (like the Vectrex... or
Cinematronics?), but I suspect that pretty similar to how the emulators
work?

> I'm sure a vector generator can be designed to do this, just think of
> how you
> could use this vector generator to run a Vectrex emulator and you'll
> understand
> what I mean.
>
I'm not sure I understand your gist yet... I'm really thinking of just
this as being used instead of a "draw_screen" procedure in an emulator.
You rip the display to the DSP RAM instead of the VGA card RAM... I
don't think that's what you mean though...

-Clay
Received on Mon Mar 23 15:08:39 1998