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Originally Posted by seanriddle
Yeah, they must have set the high bit for the internal products: the TI calculators have die IDs 81, 82 and 83, and the games are 00 and 01. But the TI30 came out something like 3 years before the games.

Speaking of calculation loops, I had forgotten how slow the TI30 is- it can take a couple of seconds to do sin/cos/tan, depending on the argument. At least they did a cool segment twirl on the rightmost digit to show it's thinking.

Yup, it does that in MESS too, when I 1st saw it I thought it was a bug. I don't know the right clockspeed btw. Could you add RC OSC(resistor/capacitor) info to your hardware descriptions? =) Not just for the TI-30.

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I'm trying to list all the components and connections in the hardware descriptions. I just double-checked, and TI-30, TI-Programmer, Business Analyst II, Electronic Detective, Comp IV and Code Name: Sector do not have any oscillator resistors or capacitors on their PCBs. That must have been another cost-cutting move TI made. Unfortunately, I didn't try to measure the clock speeds on those devices. But I do have a second TI-30; I'll try to measure the clock speed on its OSC pins. I assume the other 0980 devices run at the same speed.

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I forgot I also have a working Stop Thief.

I can't find an oscillator output on any of the TMS0980 pins, though. I used an oscilloscope to measure the pulses on pin 14 of the chips, and found that when the TI30 is first turned on and displaying just 0, that pin 14 has a period of 5.8mS. When Stop Thief is turned on and displays "1 Cr", pin 14 alternates between periods of 7.0mS and 9.1mS as the display blinks.

Doing informal count comparisons, I estimate the TI30 emulation takes nearly 50% longer to do calculations than the real unit.

Also, for some systems, I can not exit the emulator screens in MESS 157 without doing an alt-tab, then right-clicking on the icon in the task bar and choosing close window, which returns me to the MESS menu to select another system. I can hit escape from any of the information windows that pop up when I select a system before it starts running, but once some systems are running, I can't find any keystrokes to return to the menu or select controls. This is on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, running MESS64 from the command line.

For example, tab and escape work in Merlin and Simon, but not in TI30, Speak and Spell, Stop Thief, or Wizatron.

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I estimated Stop Thief to be between 400 and 450khz from the pitch/length of the sound effects. The osc is on-die? :|

Your MESS UI problem: set ui_active in mess.ini to 1 (you can create the .ini with mess64.exe -cc)

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If you have a full keyboard you can toggle if Esc goes to the emulated system or to exit MESS with ScrLk (Windows/Linux) or Delete (Mac). On a laptop, hap's hack works.

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Originally Posted by R. Belmont
On a laptop, hap's hack works.

fn+num lock is scroll lock on dell laptop keyboards.

Last edited by smf; 01/11/15 01:00 AM.
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That's clunkier though, and there are a number of laptops that don't have scroll lock at all.

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Thanks guys! My (Samsung) laptop does not have scroll lock, so I set ui_active. I must have had that set in my previous install, but forgot about it and didn't move it over to the new install.

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Originally Posted by R. Belmont
That's clunkier though, and there are a number of laptops that don't have scroll lock at all.

Some don't have it written, but they have a padlock icon on one of the function keys (on some dells it's fn+f5 for example, on Toshiba satellite it seems to be fn+f10) so you don't necessarily know you have it.

You can remap it so it's not scroll lock as well. Is it because some of them have "keyboards" that it's needed for some games and not others?



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IPT_KEYBOARD triggers the modal behavior. Arguably it should be slightly finer grained: if the system maps Esc, Tab, P, or any of the F-keys then modal.

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