Type 340 (and Type 343 slave displays and Type 347 subroutine interface) done!

[Bill E]

It is an amazing device. And yes, the manual says 'slave'. It's perfectly appropriate in this case. Anyway, see below. It can support up to 16 (!) slave displays and there was a 4 player spacewar that used it. With the new core display subsystem I did, the pidp-1 could actually support that many, although I've configured it for 'only' 7 displays. The graphics are being generated completely by the 340, the only assembly code is one instruction to fire it up, then it sits in a loop waiting for any lightpen (yes, that works also) hit and shows the coordinates in the AC register and goes back to spinning its wheels. Of course, you do have to write the graphics instructions the 340 fetches from main memory. And yes, it does curves, but not in the way you would expect.

Hmm, should have set the brightness higher for the text. It supports 8 levels, and p7sim actually pays attention to them.

Bill