The SCELBI Scope project is not revealing it’s secrets easily. With some tweaks of the pots and some new software I now have a line of star bursts. Dumping the entire pre formatted buffer in one shot seems like the way to go. I inverted the display by using the invert button on my oscilloscope. I’ll look into the implementation more thoroughly later on.

One Line of Star Bursts

It looks a bit better in real life. Next step is to figure out how to make multiple lines work. The software I wrote is supposed to print 5 lines, just like the MEA manual says it supports. One page is reserved for the scope output buffer. With 2 bytes per displayed character, 20 characters per line and 5 lines, that takes up 200 bytes. Right now, I’m automatically adding 2 extra bytes per line for the LF and end of page functions. That brings buffer consumption up to 210 bytes.

It’s going to be a real challenge to fit the software for the both the scope and keyboard displays in 256 bytes. Currently almost half of the 256 bytes is consumed just by the ASCII to a 2 byte code table in my implementation. I do think that with some clever coding, I should be able to free up a few bytes from that table and I’ll probably need it.