Re: Major Havoc board questions

If you have a spare LETA chip (uses in Crystal Castles, Millipede, Marble Madness,
Toobin', etc.) I would first swap that to see what happens. Im guessing that your
spinner works fine with Tempest? Maybe the opto is on the 'edge' and the different input
inpedances between a MH and Tempest are just enough to make something funny like this
happen.
  Either way, it is either the LETA or the opto, or maybe some sort of strange harness
grounding problem?

Doug Jefferys wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> --
> dougj |
> @ |
> hwcn.org |
Received on Tue Dec 7 14:13:21 1999