Re: Major Havoc board questions

On Mon, 6 Dec 1999, Jess Askey wrote:
>
> The Spinner is another beast. It doesn't put out the clock cycles
> quite like the normal roller does. This means that some manuvers
> are much more tricky with the spinner. If you take a look at the
> schematics and look at the LETA chip, you will see that it has a
> 'resoulution' pin. I think it is pulled high by default, if you
> attach this to ground then the LETA chip will become much more
> sensitive to the spinner and you can pretty much do anything you
> want with rex havoc. Dont' try this with a roller tho, it gets
> a bit out of control. Lots of wall slamming.

This gets me back to another problem that's bugged me for 5-6 years.

I have an MH board that worked fine when it was shipped to me. When
I powered it up, I could play the game (with a Tempest spinner) for a
while, but the spinner would gradually, over a period of several minutes,
become less responsive.

That is, at time t=powerup, one revolution of the spinner would move MH
distance X, at t=powerup+delta, MH moved X-delta, and so on, until no
amount of furious spinning would move him in either direction.

The rate of decay of responsiveness seemed to be on a nice curve, as
though a capacitor were involved somewhere. Power-cycling the machine for
a second or two gave me a "slow" controller that faded out fairly quickly,
and power-cycling for 10-15 seconds gave me a "normal" controller that
faded out at the same rate as before.

I shipped the board back to the seller, who reported no difficulties. He
shipped it back to me, same problem as before. This isn't a case of a bad
seller - his reputation is solid gold and we were working on this as more
of a debugging thing than a sale - but we never figured out what was
causing the problem. Worked on his setup, didn't work on mine.

The details, as I remember them, were an MH board running in a Grav/BW
wiring harness hooked up to another adaptor to use a Tempest CP. I can
dig out the values of the relevant crystals if anyone else has seen the
same problem and/or if they're curious.

Later,
Doug.

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