Re: Dongle news and parlour questions.
Nothing much to report on it at the moment, I've got a few sensors to evaluate, but I'm concentrating on getting the rev2 dongle code ready for the beta testing at the moment.Originally Posted by kmhamel
How's the experiments with the ball counter turning out.
Current progress on the rev2 code is...
The dongle now autodetects the smartcard reader and storage of your credit balance on a smartcard is now available in all modes. There's still a few minor bugs to work out with some of the modes. For example, when you're in a credit add mode with a blank smartcard (ie one that's never been used before), the credits read from the card will be FFF and so it will max the card out to 999 credits.
The amount of time the return button has to be held down before credits are added can now be changed in the setup mode. The adjustment range is from 0.5 seconds up to approximately 4 seconds.
The shooter handle can now be disabled when there is no card present in the card reader slot. (This setting has no effect when the smartcard option reader board is not connected).
The setup mode now contains all of the new settings (even though some of them are not fully implemented yet), and can be accessed in several new ways. Gone is the little black setup jumper link, the setup mode is now accessed by holding down both buttons while the pachinko machine is powered up. If you want to disable access to the setup mode, then you can use a jumper link on the expansion connector.
If you have a smartcard reader attached you can also use the new setup mode smartcards. These cards are specially coded to cause the dongle to enter the setup mode whenever they are inserted into the card reader.
When they are used to access the setup mode an additional setting is available, which when enabled will lock the setup mode to the unique serial number of that particular setup mode smartcard. When locked the setup mode cannot be accessed by pressing buttons during power on, or by any other setup mode smartcard.
The display animations have been put into the code and seem to work ok, but they're not linked up to any events yet. I need to make some big changes to the counter routines to integrate them fully.
After this, the next bit of code I'm working on is to make the dongle pay out multiples of 25 balls for one credit, and also make it possible to deduct more than one credit per payout.
BTW. If there are any new features you would like to see in the new versions of the dongle, now is the time to post your requests. I've still got about 20% of the memory available to use on the rev1.1 dongles and loads more on the rev2 dongles, so should be able to fit a few more features in.
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