Malban – 27th of November 2016

Hi,

I finally came around actually uploading V1.09 version of Vide. For “users” not much changed, some of the bugfixes and additions I mentioned in previous posts and there <might> be some other additions – check out the changelog: VideChangeLog.txt

The “thing” I was labouring most with (appart from Frogger – on the other hand – not so much appart as you will see) – is the emulation of the 1 Wire eEprom DS2431 (see image above).

The story behind that emulation:

Thomas Sontowski, the developer of:

• VecFever
• Robot Arena (see images)
• and some other Vectrex stuff I cannot disclose right now

… and I discovered, that we live only about 40 kilometers apart.

Last week I took some time and finally visited him at his place – at first it was sort of strange, since neither he nor I had ever met another Vectrex-Developer in real live. But I gather all in all we did quite well – and it was sort of cool to talk “vectrex” and know the one listening does actually understand (and is interested in) what you are talking about :-).

I still had a nearly 20 years old first edition cartridge of Clay’s MoonLander:

And since he also produced already a handfull of his Robot Arena cards I got #20 – so we both were also able to expand our hardware :-).

He showed me some of his stuff and I will probably use some of his hardware to build a handfull of Frogger cards.

His cartridges include the above mentioned 1Wire chip – the DS2431. That chip is a newer version of the DS2430 which was used by Alex Herbert and later Ville Krumlinde to save permanent highscores and options.

While emulating the chip I discovered a couple of differences which made emulation much more non straighforward than I thought – but I think I fixed everything now.

As usual I only emulated the parts of the chip that I know are currently used – the DS2431 has a couple of options (overdrive, bank protection etc) – that I didn’t do yet.

The only thing missing (I think) are example files, that usually accompany hardware emulated in Vide. The files are also more or less finished (mainly verbatim copies of Thomas’ files) – but I haven’t written the example programs yet – so I will not offer them (yet).

I decided (with Thomas), that Frogger will also support the DS2431 – and will have permanent highscores on cartridge.

BTW the screenshots of Robot Arena you see are taken from Vide using my own dumped binary – but unless you generate your own dump and “emulate” your own dump, you will probably not be able to see Robot Arena in Vide – Thomas included some copy protection.

Regards

Malban