On Tue, 16 Jul 2002 10:27:32 -0700 (PDT), Neil Bradley <nb@synthcom.com> wrote:
>> By the way - I'm a bit behind on my email so I don't know if this was
>> discussed already. Has anyone seen this? http://www.zektor.com
>> The Zektor Vector Generator sounds pretty cool.
Well the core Vector Generator works great! Now if we can only find some stable
DACs (we've gone through something like four DAC revisions that didn't work for
one reason or another.)
Unfortunately because of problems with DACs and CPU supplies (we're using a
brand new micro from AVR that is just now becoming available) we might not have
finished ZVGs at the show, but we'll have something running! We're just not
sure we have time to have boards assembled by the 10th, maybe, but if so, it's
going to be tight.
We should definitely have some hand assemble boards for demo'ing however.
>For additional photos:
>
>http://www.synthcom.com/~nb/battlezone.jpg
>http://www.synthcom.com/~nb/redbaron.jpg
>http://www.synthcom.com/~nb/blackwidow.jpg
>http://www.synthcom.com/~nb/mh.jpg
That last picture is a little out of place, it was taken during one of many DAC
experiments. This was also taken when the scaling factor was off, so this
picture is really a little square in the upper left corner of a full vector
monitor that has been blown up with the size adj to fill the screen, which
*really* brought out the problem with the DAC's reference voltage. It was a good
picture for debugging, but not much for showing of the ZVG. ;-)
When running properly (like the other pic's) the Vectors really are straight and
precisely drawn.
>> I'm wondering how well
>> it works and if you can use Mame to drive it?
>No need for MAME. Retrocade will drive it with the -zvg option and will be
>made available before the ZVG's release.
MAME was not very optimized for vector games (or at all for that matter ;-),
hooking into it's framebuffer for the vector generator can be a bit kludgy.
When Neil stepped in and offered to rework Retrocade I *jumped* at the
opportunity!
With the Vector version of Retrocade we only need to support the 30+ vector
games that can be displayed on a vector monitor. With MAME you have a mammoth
program that can play thousands of games, but without a raster monitor, it's a
bit of an overkill.
The goal, eventually is to be able to power up the system without the need of a
raster monitor, using vector menus and the such. Though in reality I think a lot
of BIOS's require a display board of one type or another, so I'm not sure how
obtainable that goal is. The internal structure of Retrocade made it very easy
for Neil to hook into his vectorlist for ZVG use, and since the cores of
On the other hand the full ZVG command set and PC-driver source will be made
available, (include help from me) for anyone that wants to take on MAME!
-Zonn
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Received on Tue Jul 16 11:21:30 2002
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