New Cinematronics Information Available

I just finished updating my Cinematronics website: www.zonn.com/Cinematronics

Some things y'all might be interested in:

#1 -- I've rewritten my programmer's reference manual. It's now in PDF format.
But more importantly I've document the bizarre behavior of the Cinematronics
flags. Something I've been meaning to do for a long time and figured I'd better
do it soon before I completely forgot how they worked.

It's got a bit of new information in it and is hopefully easier to follow than
my last version.

#2 -- Even though it's only in a partially completed state, I've released a
software utility that allows you to exercise a Cinematronics soundboard by
plugging it into the parallel port of a PC.

It allows you to trigger individual sounds of a soundboard. Good for trouble
shooting and for sampling sounds for emulators, mult-game soundboards, etc. It
comes with source code.

Along with that is some very detailed information on some of the soundboards I
reversed engineered to create CSXOR (the Cinematronics Soundboard Exercisor).
These were the write ups given to Neil to add sound to Retrocade.

Anyone working on a universal sound board should find these very useful.

#3 -- I've documented all I/O instructions, in the different games, where the
INP and OUT instructions read the control panel, and write to the sound board
and Vectorbeam monitor.

This is very handy if you want to say, hack some Ripoff ROMSs to play in an
Armor Attack without rewiring the control panel and finding a Ripoff soundboard.

You'd patch the 'INP' instructions to read the Armor Attack control panel, and
change the 'OUT' instructions to trigger sounds similar to Ripoff, but using the
Armor Attack soundboard.

It's a little involved, but knowing where the patch points to the different
games is a real good start. So to anyone interested, the information is on the
website.

#4 -- I've released the source to CINEMU, my version of a Cinematronics
emulator. I don't know useful that will be to anyone, but a few people have
asked for it, now here it is.

----
I think I've pretty much taken all the interesting and useful stuff [about
Cinematronics] I have on my hard disk, wrapped it up in ZIP files, and uploaded
it to my website.  I'm hoping it will be a little more useful there.
-Zonn
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