February 8, 1999

The Marvin Team has seen some hard times since the last posting. It seemed at times that we would officially disband. We have decided not to disband, and we are as of this point going to try to complete the competition robot. However, I suspect that we will not do well this time around simply because of the lack of support from the school. It is still a posibility however that we will end work on it before we start on it too much. Nothing has yet been built because we have no materials.

We are not going to disband, but we may pull out of the competition. We will still continue our robot project, but of the competition robot moving back the rest of the project, I cannot give a timetable and expect it to be different than what is posted off of our home page.

Also, we are attempting to gain club status at Geneva. If we get this worked out, we can get external funding and things will really start moving.

[NOTE: Due to reasons of tact, this entry has been modified from it's original post. Modifications are limited to deletions and elaborations.]

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Fabruary 25, 1999:

Things have moved far in the last 17 days. This is what has been completed in programming:
OS library converted to Dayla 2.0
Command0 library created

Dayla 2.0 functions added to OS library:
Ascii -> Hex digit
Dayla number decoder
Dayla line executor
Dayla task executor

Dayla 2.0 main features that are working:
interrupts (YEA!)
user input code (YEA!)
Plug-N-Play detection of Mainboard
TSR's
Software drivers
A few more odds and ends...

There has also been a few good things happening with the hardware. We do not as of yet have the materials for the competition robot, but I think we will soon. The good that has happened is that a TI92 with an external module has successfully beed modified to run a Marvin unit. That software detects the external ROM and adjusts accordingly. The Marvin unit is addressed at 0hC00000 instead of 0h400000. So far it looks like it works fine. The good thing about this is that we may be able to port Dayla 2.0 to TI92 Plus instead of Fargo and then port that to TI89. This would be a cheaper alternative than to have to buy TI92's, and the 89 has the Plus software already. Still, the question is do we want Marvin to be "A Robot From a TI92" or "A Robot From a TI89" or "A Robot From a TI92, TI92 Plus or TI89"???


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