Re: Cinemenu, part 3

> Looks great, Paul! (Did you change the lines in the asterisk? They
> look different now-- better.) No visible distortions except maybe a
> little bit on the last asterisk in "* MULTIGAME *". Looks like they
> might not have all lined up at the center. The rest are fine though--
> could be a monitor thing.

In version 2 I changed the line drawing code to work like:
1) calculate end point (add char position to offset in font table)
2) wait for previous line to complete
3) send beam on it's way to start point
4) calculate end point (see 1)
5) calculate delta X,Y & "normalize"
6) Start drawing toward end point.

Version 1 had step 4 before step 2. When you said the asterisk and C were
a little goofy I made this change to give more settling time. I also went
through the letters and made some changes. I assumed a letter should start
close to the lower left and end close to the lower right and make small
jumps. The changes to the asterisk in this respect was significant. As you
can see, I don't pause while the beam move to the start other than the time
it takes to run neessary code :-) This wasn't long enough for the first
line of a text string... The asterisk is 4 lines, if they don't line up
it's nonlinearity :-)

> I didn't mess with the controls at all (didn't plug 'em in). Assuming I
> have a working PCB, should they do anything with the RipOff controls?

If I can read schematics correctly today it looks like it's mapped to
player one left in Rip Off. Quick check... Emulator cfg file says the
same thing.

As for debugging what you've got, I'd check for activity on:
pin 15 of C4 - this is the entry into TTL (push the button)
pin 9 of A6 - should pulse twice per frame (26ms) as the menu polls
pin 5 of C4 - when you press the button
pin 10 of A6 - when you press the button
pin 8 of F6 - when...
Do you have schematics?
BTW, if ripoff could read DIPs it's probably C4.

this last output leads to pin 4 of H10 - an OR gate which would kill
a lot if the other input didn't work (it's between the accumulator and
the ALU).

> Anyway-- duty cycle, measured at pin 11 on F2 looks to be:
>
> low - 7.4ms
> high - 18.8ms
>
> Onscreen 'scope cursors are your friend. ;-)

That's really cool! So it uses about 72% of the CPU time to display
4 lines of text (or is that 28% no...) It also tells us that each frame
is 26.2ms +/- twice the error of your measurement. Our emulator runs with
26ms frames, the schematics were labeled 26.5.

> Let me know if I should try to debug my input section and try out the
> inputs (or if RipOff had different control mappings).

Go for it. If by chance you can select games....
When A10 (CE) pin 19 of the roms goes hi a number that depends on the
game selected should appear on A2-9 (pins 6,5,4,3,2,1,23,22) on the rom.
Only the first 5 games or so have distinct numbers, I forget what - it's
in a table in rom.

If you have any other debug questions just ask. And don't take my word about
pin numbers, I found a mistake above and corrected it :-)

BTW Clay, I reqested e-mail confirmation on my MAX502 samples and haven't
heard anything yet (that was friday). How long do they take?

And so the CineMenu software works well. Anyone heard from Mark S ???

Thanks a bunch,

--
 ___   __   _   _  _
|   \ /  \ | | | || |       phkahler@oakland.edu     Engineer/Programmer
|  _/| || || |_| || |__     " What makes someone care so much?
|_|  |_||_| \___/ |____)      for things another man can just ignore. " -S.H.