The VDB is the ISA card that fans the PC's Cirrus Logic framebuffer to the six
secondary cockpit displays (5 mono + 1 color), dividing the pixel clock. From
the driver (CODE/RP/MUNGA_L4/L4SVGA16.ASM, L4VB16.CPP; "Adam's port decoder
design" -- Adam G., VWE hardware):
0x300/0x308/0x310 three VGA-DAC-style palette groups
0x31A / 0x319 splitter high-color clock divider ON / OFF
New emulated VDB device in vpxlog.cpp at I/O 0x300-0x31A (active when logging,
disable with VDB=0): decodes palette write-address/data/mask/read-address and
the clock strobes, recording palette contents + splitter state so the six-
display encoding can be decoded later. Validated: with gauges enabled
(gauge.conf, setenv arg4=g) the game issues "splitter clock ON (0x31A)" ->
captured. The board is write-only (game never reads it, per driver + owner),
so its absence is not the crash.
Crash diagnosis (BTL4OPT.EXE CODE+0x123B): the faulting routine is a heap
free() with boundary-tag coalescing; it was handed a garbage block pointer
(value 2). Symptom of upstream corruption, reached only when the RIO is in
sync and the sim advances. HISTORY.md gains a "Cockpit display hardware -- the
VDB" section with the attribution.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Parses the DIV-VIZ2 formats (VGF geometry, VMF materials, TGA
textures, SPL splines, SCN scenes) from the STDAVE directory of the
Glaze drive and re-renders VWE's unreleased 1996 Star Trek pod
scenes in a self-contained WebGL page: the Enterprise-D among
drifting starfields (TREK.SCN) and the Klingon flyby (KLNGVID.SCN).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records the contents of the recovered VWE developer hard drive
(git-ignored sda4/): pod lab infrastructure, Division renderer
source with i860/Pixel-Planes 5 code, runnable game builds, and
unreleased projects (Star Trek prototype, Hull Pressure, Renegade
Legion, and the Starship Troopers pitch that became DisneyQuest's
Invasion!). Includes a source-completeness analysis showing the
engine libraries are rebuildable but most game-logic sources are
absent from this release cut.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 4.8