Re: Who's hogging all the Catbox docs

Wow, cool reading, thanks for the link. Now if I only had the rom file for
the eprom chip at C5, I could build one of these from scratch. I'm sure
that someone who is good with FPGA's could do a large chunk of the catbox,
if not all of it, in one of those.

With respect to signature analysis on the Cinematronics CPU board, the setup
is using the 16-bit counter (and a few gates) to cycle the board logic and
an HP 5004A signature analyzer box. I read somewhere that HP used their own
proprietary CRC algorithm but I have to wonder if it would be possible to
scratch build a signature display that would show the same values.
Obviously, Atari designed their own sig generator with the very simple
catbox circuitry so it's certainly possible to build something that would do
the job. The HP5004A unit is getting pretty old and it can be hard to find
one that is still working. It's hard to sell the Cine Exorciser to people
that do not have the HP5004A unit. It would be nice to combine an Exorciser
with its own sig display. Then the HP5004A unit would not be needed. Maybe
a CPLD sig generator circuit could be built that could be combined with a
simple microcontroller, say a Microchip PIC that could control a simple LCD
for the readout and any other settings or indicators desired. The trick is
to get it to generate the exact same sig codes as the HP5004A does. I
assume that that would require getting the value of the polynomial correct,
that is assuming that HP didn't really muck about too much when it came to
make their sig generator proprietary.

William Boucher

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom McClintock" <tomm@bhpllc.com>
To: <vectorlist@vectorlist.org>
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: VECTOR: Who's hogging all the Catbox docs

> http://ionpool.net/arcade/signature_analysis/How_Atari_Signature_Analysis_Works.html
>
>
> ?
>
> Kevin Moore wrote:
>> Seems every site I've tried is no longer around.
>>
>> I'm looking for some links to catbox info, I've been able to use the cat
>> box for basic tempest stuff using the tempest doc I have, but when it
>> comes to doing sig analysis I'm doing something wrong.. I can't get any
>> sigs to come up.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>
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Received on Mon Nov 23 19:53:26 2009