In my quest to write a manual for Direct, I’ve been going through the code with a pair of tweezers, along with the machine trying stuff out.
A lot of the functionality is pretty straight forward and I got it mapped out, but some pattern / sequence related stuff threw me for a loop.
My experiments often resulted in weird sounding sequences where I would expect things I had entered in the machine. It dawned on me that maybe the workspace region memory was having issues. So I swapped the old, stacked IC’s witih a couple of fresh ones in the correct size.
This stacking was done with smaller capacity ICs to create one unit in the correct footprint, presumably back in the late 80’s, the correct sized IC’s were not available or extremely expensive. I now have a box full of ‘m for a few bucks, so I swapped them.
And indeed it seemed to fix a lot of issues. Next up will be replacing the OS memory, but before I do that, I want the melcard stuff working, so I can dump and load via card (and check the correct content).
Another thing is to extend the programming. This version has a ton of stuff in it, but error handling can be improved. There are a lot of things that don’t give complete feedback or in some cases, nothing at all. I’ve made a list of which I want to add. This will all become release 1.8.
