G'day folks,
I think I figured out why Paul was getting resets when running Space
Wars on the emulator! I was having the exact same problem last night!!
I got Star Hawk and Space Wars running on 2532s on a SC motherboard,
but the Space Wars would reset after about 10 seconds of play. It'd
just restart from the beginnning of the program, sorta like what Paul
was seeing with the sun in Space Wars being redrawn again and again.
Well, the solution is to open all the dipswitches! By openning a
dipswitch, you disconnect ground from the dipswitch inputs to the
motherboard (F2 off the top of my head?) and the dipswitch inputs
to the motherboard all get pulled up. Then Space Wars will run!!
Tell me if this lets you run Space Wars on the emulator, Paul!!!
I didn't get anywhere with Speed Freak. I disconnected the JMI
jumper and I also flipped all the dipswitches to open. It still
was in constant rest, but displaying a picture so no breakers popped.
Lastly, I think I've figured out a universal way around the problem
of differing control panel inputs!!!!! If we use three 1 meg EPROMs,
we can connect the first 16 inputs to a universal control panel that
can handle all Cinematronics/Vectorbeam games (except Tail Gunner and
Speed Freak since both use pots). Connect the last 4 inputs of the
EPROM to a select between a potential 16 games....I can only think
of 12 games at the moment beyond Tail Gunner and Speed Freak. Then
each of the three EPROMs will output 8 bits, giving you a total of
24 bits to be fed from the EPROM into the 20 input pins on the mother
board!! The cost is under $20 and wiring should be minimal!! All
we need to do is put together a memory map using the various manuals
....though at the moment we don't have a manual for War of the Worlds,
Rocket Racer or Sundance.
Sorry for all this delay, Kurt. Fixing sound boards will quickly
rise to the top of my list now that I've proven that all of these
games can run on the SC platform. I think it's time to add another
20 position, 4 pole switch to my Rip Off cabinet to handle another
four games in addition to RO, SC, AA and SQ!!!!! Besides, I want to
have an excuse to implement this EPROM solution to my contorl panel!
But all of this will wait until I get your boards out Kurt.
Steve Ozdemir
