Hallo Mike,
also im Prinzip nur kleinere, interne Änderungen, die 'hap' in letzter Zeit an einigen Treibern noch vorgenommen hat -
nichts was der Benutzer überhaupt bemerken dürfte.
Dann hat 'hap' vor ein paar Tagen auch noch eine schon länger zurückliegende Änderung beim Fidelity CSC erwähnt (Zugriff auf das Buch),
und da habe ich damals im vorigen Jahr übersehen, das auch in den älteren CB-Emu-Treiber zu übernehmen.
Und schließlich noch die paar Änderungen/Bugfixes an einigen Plugins aus den letzten Tagen.
Also nichts wirklich Aufregendes ...

Grüße,
Franz

Hallo Franz,
danke für die schnelle Info.
Manchmal sind auch die scheinbar kleinen Dinge erwähnenswert!
Für Dein unermüdliches Engagement in Sachen CB-Emu meinen allergrößten Respekt. Das Projekt hat mir schon sehr viele schöne und kurzweilige Stunden beschert.
LG
Mike

Hi hap,

after your change of the SmartBoard driver the LED blinking is indeed much better now!

But there's still one serious logical bug in this SmartBoard driver since Sandro has created this driver - I guess Sandro just didn't think about these situations:
Whenever you try to chose a piece on the S.BOARD INTERFACE, the driver checks if this piece is still 'available' ("if (piece_available(...)"), and this method leads to 2 serious problems:
1) You can't put the wanted piece on the board after a pawn promotion, when this piece is still on the board (either 1 queen or 2 rooks/bishops/knights), i.e. you can't promote to a 2nd queen for example.
2) And the same problem exists when you want to setup a position: it's not possible to chose more than 1 queen or 2 rooks/bishops/knights of the same colour, although the Tasc R30 accepts such positions of course.

In my CB-Emu package I've fixed this problem long time ago (in MessExtra/MessChess) by simply commenting out this piece test in the following routine:
Of course this could have been done in different ways, but this method was just the shortest way to skip this test, and I've not found any problems yet - you can promote to any piece and also setup positions with more than the usual 1 or 2 pieces of the same kind.

Just an information for you - I don't know if you want to fix this problem also in the MAME driver (maybe in any other way) ...

Regards,
Franz

Maybe most of the software is ok with it. The smartboard manual is pretty clear about that each piece has its own unique frequency. And the R30 manual mentions you need to play with a different piece if the queen is not available. (in other words, R30 did not come with 2 queens per color)

Does anyone have the DOS version of the smartboard testing program?
The one mentioned in this manual: http://isabelle.zanchetta.free.fr/TascPCUS.pdf
*edit* ok, it's over here: https://web.archive.org/web/20030212...nloadable.html

There's also smartmon, a Windows version, but that doesn't test as much. Here's a MAME screenshot.

Yes, at least all 4 chess modules for the Tasc R30 work perfectly with my modifications, internally they just don't care about whether e.g. a rook is ROOK1 or ROOK2. The Tasc R30 programs have a quite strong test of legal or illegal positions, which is even displayed when entering the 'position' menu:
the program accepts only 16 pieces for each side, only 1 king and 8 pawns, but any number of the other pieces (QRBN) as long as one pawn is removed for every additional piece.

According to these conditions I've now changed my code a bit, I've restored the 'piece_available' function, and changed the tests in 'spawn_cb':
keeping the 'if (piece_available(...))' checks for the king and the pawns, removing this check completely for the queen, and for the other 3 pieces I only check for PIECE1 - if not available then I use PIECE2 (so this would happen for all additional pieces).
It's not much difference to my first version, but now at least all usual pieces have their correct internal numbers again.
Well, it's not only about a 2nd queen after a promotion, it's also about solving chess puzzles with more than the usual number of pieces of the same color (e.g. 2 queens or 3 knights).
You can definitely set up such a position on a real Tasc R30 (you just could have some extra pieces from an other R30), but you can't do this with the current SmartBoard driver in the original MAME - except you use my MessExtra version ...

Alright, I added an option to allow duplicate piece IDs. Smartmon doesn't complain about it either.

hap, yesterday you've added the following:
"smartboard: add support to connect it to pc printer port"

How can this be used or tested?
I don't see anything wrt. printer or centronics in any menu, not in MAME and not in Tasc R30 either ...
Does this require a real PC printer or can this be emulated in MAME?

For the Novag SuperForte you have mentioned an option "-rs232 terminal" long time ago, so I've now tried it for the TascR30 with options like
"-centronics", "-printer", "-lpt1" etc., but nothing worked.

It is for the PC driver, connect smartboard to the PC printer port.
The screenshots above are running a test tool on Windows 95.

Below is a screenshot of Rebel 6(DOS) + Smartboard, using TASCDRV.EXE
Is it useful to play with on an emulator? not really, all it does is duplicate another user interface. But it's fun that it works.

welche ton ist gleich wie echte RISC2500/Montreux? https://tsk-tsk.net/net/temp/riscs/
On -> D4 -> reply -> Off

My guess is risc7.mp3
I couldn't find videos of it on youtube.

Hi hap,

original Montreux. Reicht dir das?

Gruß
Micha

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