A89: Re: Re: Wierd Calc Thing
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A89: Re: Re: Wierd Calc Thing
I don't know where you got that from, but I can't see any reason why
grayscale would use any more battery power.
I think the real reason is that in order to use the STOP instruction, you
have to be in supervisor mode, so games aren't able to use it to conserve
battery power. On the 8x calcs, programmers can use the HALT instruction,
which is equivalent, to go into low power mode.
It's possible that there is a trap that will exectue a stop, and that would
be very useful. It's also possible to reduce the number of scanlines on the
89 to 100 and save battery power that way, none of which any programs I know
of do .. it would be cool if one of the shells were to do that for us.
>
>My guess is that you were playing greyscale games. 4-level greyscale uses
>twice as much battery power as regular b/w, so that is why the batteries
>drained so fast. Also, because all of the hardware isn't getting all of
the
>power it needs when the batteries are low, the interupt that switches the
>screen address in greyscale mode misses a few and that's why you notice a
>pause. If you supply more power (replace batteries) then this will go
away.
>
>-Miles Raymond EML: m_rayman@bigfoot.com
>ICQ: 13217756 IRC: Killer2 AIM: MRayMan
>http://www.bigfoot.com/~m_rayman/
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Timothy Kong <asm89@juno.com>
>To: assembly-89@lists.ticalc.org <assembly-89@lists.ticalc.org>
>Date: Wednesday, February 10, 1999 4:11 PM
>Subject: A89: Wierd Calc Thing
>
>
>>Has anyone else noticed that when the batteries are low, you can't send
>>anything large to the 89? The computer reports a checksum error. It
>>happened on both my 89 and a friend's. Speaking of which, why does the 89
>>go through batteries so fast? The rechargable alkaline didn't even last
>>for a month. I didn't use it any more than my other calcs (86 and 82).
>>Another wierd thing I noticed was that games started to pause for a
>>split-second every few seconds. I never had this before. Everything went
>>away after I replaced the batteries. Any ideas?
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>
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