G'day folks,
Well, I'd say I'm officially back online after that long hiatus
where I was all but dead to the arcade video game hobby. Ray
had a question about how to get vectors on AA to meet at a point.
Paul's answer sound right to me, but I thought I should also add
that on Atari games there is something called XBIP and YBIP that
are pots that you can adjust to get vectors to meet at a point.
I believe that the BIPs are on the actual game board and also
don't have anything to do with the monitor. If the pot is acting
as a resistor in an RC circuit like Paul mentioned, then I'd say
that something went wrong in your RC circuit...replace the whole
thing.
Along similar lines, Paul, for that Vectorbeam board that I have
where all I get are just points of light (ie. no line length)
in the shap of the object, do you think that this RC circuit
could also be suspect? Remember that this Vectorbeam board
has that other strange symptom that the board seems to be in
single frame mode...or in other words, the system only goes
forward a frame if you push a button!
Lastly, as to making the master control panel for Cinematronics,
I think we need to know what games will be included beyond the
standard four. To start the list, I can include Warrior, Barrier,
Star Hawk, Speed Freak and Rocket Racer. I can't say whether we
should include Tail Gunner and Speed Freak with their pots. Also,
we probably should exclude Boxing Bugs, since it used a whirligig.
We could consider including War of the Worlds and Sundance once
we learn more about their control panels....I can guarantee that
Sundance's control panel is just a keypad. If we take my suggestion,
then we'd be trying to put 11 games into the universal control
panel. I'd suggest two joysticks, 10 buttons and a 3 by 4 keypad
to be used by Space Wars, Sundance and Barrier. If we didn't hook
up two keys on the keypad, then we'd have 8 + 10 + 10 control
panel inputs plus another 4 game select inputs for a grand total
of 32 inputs going to 20 outputs. Actually, I don't think this
is going to work, since 32 inputs implies 4 gigabytes, doesn't it?
Damn...what'd I do wrong? Oh, yes, before we probably just had
the joysticks and the buttons for 18 control panel inputs and 4
game select inputs for a total of 22 inputs implying only 4 megabytes.
What are we going to do about the keypads? Should we just drop
Space Wars, Barrier and Sundance?? We'd only have 8 games, leaving
us a spare bit to use in translation since we'd only need 3 select
lines! But the resulting control panel wouldn't be as useful...
By the way Paul, have you got that hardware I dropped off going?
I still have yet to get you a list of questions. How's the new
house working out??
Steve Ozdemir
