Not in the least spent most of my weekend either at work or remoted-in to work. The perils of being an IT professional that is on-call 24/7...

_________________
- Doug

Software hasn't arrived yet.

Cheers,
Stefan

Interesting that DOS 2.11 can't be run on a 3.5" floppy, only a 360k 5.25" floppy.

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

Strike!!

I just got GRiDBasic installed on my Compass and IT WORKS!!!!!! [insert evil laughter here]

More soon to come...

Cheers,
Stefan

Nice! Congrats Stephan!

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

I've done some testing of the GRiDBasic.
The good news is that I can draw lines and circles without a problem. I can even draw text. However, here's where the problems starts: You need 3 differend fonts for the sentry gun display and you can choose only one. There is also no way to load or store a bitmap from the Basic.
I'll try to analyse original fonts that I have for the compass. With some luck I might be able to fit several partial fonts in one font file.

Cheers,
Stefan

I was thinking it would be easy to do arrays of the characters needed. Then just draw each character in a font pixel by pixel.

_________________
- Doug

Yep, identifying the characters in not that much of a problem. However, the font files also contain other information to be handled correctly by the OS and I'll have to figure out what these bytes do. Also, as I can only load one font file, I'll have to cheat the system by replacing letters not used in the sentry gun text with letters in a differend (smaller) font size.

Cheers,
Stefan

Ok, I made a new discovery - the large display of the Compass has 512x256 Pixel while the small display has 320x240 Pixel!
I've updated my previous posts.

In regard to the font files I made some progress, but also found new problems:
- With the external disc drive I was able to transfer the font files and the GRiDBasic from the 1107 to my 1131.
- I transfered the font files to my PC via the 1131's internal modem.
- I've identified most of the font files data structure. However, it looks like some sort of checksum is used in the files and I'll have to figure out how this works.
- The GRiDBasic might be too slow to display the gun counters correctly.
- I found some assembler code of a terminal program for the GRiD that might be useful to create a DOS version.

That's it for now.

Cheers,
Stefan

I'm following this thread and really impressed with the progress being made.
Have the files on the links above been backed up anywhere?
(Just in case they are removed from those hosts)

Also, may be a dumb question but how were these done originally?
Has a source for the original programmer ever been located or researched?

Great work, keep it up.

_________________

I don't believe anyone has ever stepped forward saying they did the programs for the film.

It would be interesting to find out who did it, and how they did.

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

My guess would be that GRiD lent the four 1139s to the production (they are mentioned in the credits) and I wouldn't be surprised if someone of their staff did the programming (someone familiar with the Compass and a working programming environment could do this in a day if the fonts are present).
It would be interesting if there's any kind of production artwork/script that served as the basis for the programming.

Cheers,
Stefan

Any updates lads?

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

I've shelved the idea to use the GRiDBasic - it would make things far too slow. The new plan is to write the program in assembler as I found some code to access the screen memory of the compass. Also this version would run with MS-DOS and thus it should run on the Gridcases too (with some small modifications).

Cheers,
Stefan

Nice! Looking forward to see what you come up with!

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

Any chance of an update guys?

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

Hi Russ,

I've made some small progress in setting up the assembler and doing some test programming with it.
It looks quite promising so far, but the weather is getting better and I already do too much computer stuff at work....

Cheers,
Stefan

Hey, time for a monthly update! Get to work, slackers!

(Actually, I can't say anything, my Pulse Rifle has been sitting in pieces for 6 months or more...)

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

The weather is ok and I'm still working on my DS-helmet. So no progress on the sentry gun program.
Actually, I probably won't get back to it before autum - sorry.

Cheers,
Stefan

Hey Stefan, Autumn has come and gone... got the sentry gun software done yet?

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

On the subject of Sentry Gun programs, what are your options if you do not have a floppy drive?

Thanks!

Greg

_________________
CPL A08/TQ0.0.12146E1
Newell, Greg A aka Gman
Illinois - USA
UKCM
Shoot first, think never.
Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun.
SMMFD
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist.

Sadly, no news on the SG program from my side yet. I hope to finish my DS-helmet during the X-Mas holidays and after that the sentry gun program will be revived.

Greg, if you don't have a floppy drive but a compass with functional bubble memory and a(n internal) modem, then there's hope. I have already transfered files from the bubble memory of my Compass to my PC via modem and it should work the other way around too. The catch is that the some characters were inserted during the transfer and I had to filter them out. I'll let you know when I have a solution for this.

Cheers,
Stefan

When the program is finished, the prize will be a Gridcase bag for the creator!

Can't wait to get a more interactive program....

Progress (hopefully) bump!

Russ

_________________
"A writer needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army." - Orson Wells.

http://www.rookscastle.com
http://www.alchemyarms.com

Sadly not. I'm doing too much programming at work right now. Can't convince myself to do some more in the evening

Cheers,
Stefan