G'day folks,
Well, work has been hell for the last three weeks.....an average developer
produces between 2000 and 3000 lines of uncommented, non-whitespace code
in a year (mainly because of some incredibly stringent methodology that
precludes hacking of any type), and I just produced 2500 uncommented, non-
whitespace lines of code in this three week period! I asked my boss if
I could take the rest of the year, since I've filled my quota! 8^)
Anyways, I was over at Rick's last night and I decided to burn some EPROMs
with some of Bill Esquivel's Barrier/Speed Freak data! I failed to split
up Warrior data across some 2716s, but given the success of Paul's idea
of using 2532s in a RO/SC motherboard, I slapped some 2532s with Warrior
data into the RO/SC motherboard and it worked!!!! (I can't tell you how
frustrating it was to know that I was that close to solving my Warrior
problem back about two years ago....if I'd just pulled the 2532s from
the Vectorbeam board and put them in a RO/SC motherboard, then I would
have avoided a LONG search!) Anyways, so the myth that I started about
Vectorbeam boards being more flexible/valuable has been debunked, and
Al Kossow was correct that his data would work on standard RO/SC mother
boards....you just have to try them in 2532s!
I got Barrier and Warrior data going, and when I tried Speed Freak the
game would undergo constant reset. However, it did display the beginning
picture to Speed Freak, so the breakers didn't pop! I thought about it
while I was driving home, and I'm realized that the JMI strap wasn't on
Speed Freak and maybe it's inadvertently jumping back to the beginning of
the code? So I'll disable the JMI strap tonight and see if I can put
both Space Wars and Speed Freak on a RO/SC motherboard!!
So in summary, so far on a Rev K Cinematronics motherboard, we have
Solar Quest, Armor Attack, Star Castle, Rip Off, Warrior, Barrier and
probably both Space Wars, Star Hawk and Speed Freak! We don't have
data for War of the Worlds and Sundance. Oops, I forgot that we also
have Rocket Racer going on a Rev K Cinematronics motherobard! The only
game that I haven't mentioned are Tail Gunner and Boxing Bugs. So
I can see that immediately we can put at least 11 games into a grand
conversion and we might be able to crank that up to 14 games if we
can find Sundance data, figure out how to integrate Tail Gunner and
Boxing Bugs.
I'd say based on recent developments that I may stop the Cinematronics
on a chip project, since if we can use RO/SC motherboards there's really
no reason to do the project. RO/SC motherboards come a dime a dozen!
(Also I've heard that someone has had some success at repairing them.)
I think starting the universal sound board project is a much better use
of our time. What do you all think?
Steve Ozdemir
ps - Kinda funny that the Williams project is coming up with a universal
cabinet about the same time that a Cinematronic universal cabinet might
finally be possible!
.....but I'll never give up my Warrior cabinet anyways!! I don't care
how impressive the Cinematronics universal cabinet might be!!!
