RE: Tempest Multigame (holding pattern)

On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Clay Cowgill wrote:
> Zonn writes:
> > While reverse engineering the Mathbox for Retrocade, I have a *very*
> > vague memory of someone emailing me about more than one version of the
> > Mathbox proms. Like something was added for Tempest from the Red
> > Baron version (or vica-versa). I'm pretty sure there are some mathbox
> > routines that are never called by Tempest. Maybe they need to be
> > there for Vortex / Aliens?
>
> That's my primary suspicion at the moment. Doug has a "rev 1" Mathbox
> board, but you'd think that that would probably be closer to what Aliens or
> Vortex would want... I'm going to go scrounging and see what I can figure
> out during lunch...

Later tonight I'll try and get a third Tempest set, currently toast but
looking fixable, running; right now the two boards I'm using are of fairly
low serial number vintage. The third board is a couple months "newer"
than the first two.

I'll also try swapping mathboxen to eliminate math box revisions and/or
anything related to the content of the EAROM and/or a possibly flaky POKEY
as a problem. I'll also reinstall the kit from scratch to eliminate user
error (i.e. me being a doofus :) as a source of trouble.

The bytes in the PROMs on the Tempest, BZ, and RB math boxes were the same
the last time I looked. There were some math box changes from BZ->RB due
to RB's EAROM, and a main board change as well, involving another chip.
The difference between Tempest and RB math-box wise is presumably larger,
as Tempest has that extra POKEY to deal with.

Full details on the revision numbers and serial numbers of my "boards that
don't run Aliens or Vortex" will be coming later tonight or earlier
tomorrow.

Later,
Doug.

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