Re: Cinemenu round 2!

On Fri, 27 Mar 1998 14:47:46 -0800, Clay Cowgill <ClayC@diamondmm.com> wrote:

>Hey Everyone,
>
>Guess I should contribute something none-Hummer related today. ;-)
>
>I fired up Paul's new menu code with the following results:
>
>1) Hey! There's a screen full of text! *yay!*
>2) Hey! It looks like my first try with the Sega Menu system! ;-)
>*Hmmmmm*
>
>It doesn't look like there's enough time for the beam to make it to the
>starting characters.
>
>a) The first asterisk in "* CINEMATROICS *" is still deformed-- the
>second one looks fine.
>b) the first character of each line of text is missing its first
>segment:
> "S" in "SELECT" (bottom of "S" gone)
> "A" in "ARMOR ATTACK" (left edge of "A" gone)
> "M" in "MULTIGAME" (left edge of "M" gone)
>
>(Actually, "gone" is a bit of a misnomer. It's more like "splattered
>all over the left side of the screen in some form of 'beam on before I
>get there' roadkill". :-)
>
>On the SegaMultigame I took the easy way out at first and just plotted a
>"space" before each line of text (don't care if the "space" is deformed
>since it's invisible). That took vector time that I needed though, so I
>ended up changing the draw order around and made a couple smaller jumps
>instead.
>
>Looks good so far though! Good going, Paul!

Scott Boden mentioned to Bill Paul a couple of things you have to be careful
about when programming for a Vector monitor in general.

----
#1 The screen should be as symmetrical as possible.  Any non symmetries will
heat up the output transistors/yoke, by placing a DC-bias on the signal.
#2 The yoke has memory (he said this one really took him a while to figure out,
and was pretty emphatic on making this point clear).  Any time you draw to one
side of the screen and then draw at the center of the screen, the yoke can
remain slightly magnetized in the previous direction.  So if you draw in the top
of the screen, the draw something in the middle, then the bottom of the screen,
then in the middle, the two middle drawing might not line up.
His solution was to write a simple "degauss" routine where he jumps back and
forth between the edges of the screen a few times to degauss the yoke when he'd
been drawing on one side to too long.
----
I believe you can see this last routine in effect by looking at the star in the
center of Solar Quest.  The star seems to drift slightly and will then "jump"
back to the center.  At first I thought this was a monitor thing -- yet it
happened on all monitors, after hearing of Scott's comments I now wonder if
that's when his degauss routine kicks in.
-Zonn
BTW:  I don't know if I ever mentioned this or not, but Scott also talked about
an in house game that him and another programmer were constantly modifying as a
sort of sick joke.  There were these clowns that would fly across the screen and
the object was to blow them away.  Not much of a game but I guess it really
irked the management [maybe the faces were just a little too recognizable?],
which made it more fun to work on.  I guess the fun part was adding or changing
something as a surprise to the other programmer.
Unfortunately he says the code is long gone.  :^(
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
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