Re: Second Sight news??

[at217@chebucto.ns.ca (Michael Hackett)]

Sheldon Simms (sheldon@atlcom.net) wrote:
> I believe Michael Hackett had to disassemble the firmware himself
> in order to make the damn thing work. I know that when I was
> playing around with my card, the biggest problem I had was that
> the firmware was buggy and incomplete, and Sequential didn't care.

Indeed, I have made a complete disassembly of the interface firmware (not
the emulation code, though), and with that was able to fix a couple of
critical bugs in the firmware that had effectively disabled the ability
to upload and run code directly on the card. With the firmware's limited
command set, being able to add your own code is essential to getting
reasonable performance out of the card. These bugs prevented even that
from happening.

The bug fix INIT has not been generally released as it currently only of
use to programmers who might want to write SS code. Since there aren't
any programs available yet that need the fix, no one needs the INIT. Plus,
it ended up revealing a small bug in the first release of the Spectrum SS 
ANSI driver (comes with Spectrum 2.1), and the two are incompatible. I
believe the driver has been fixed, but not everyone may have the update.
If you are a programmer and want the fix, write to me.

Regarding Sequential not caring, that has been my experience as well.
Several times I was promised source and engineering notes by Joesph Y.,
but nothing ever came. I even offered the firmware fixes to Sequential,
but they never even bothered to respond.