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.