vPLASMA slims to a bare glass hardwired to COM12

The window is now just the display: 640x160 dot field (5 px pitch,
4 px bezel) plus the title bar, which carries the port status. COM12 —
the device end of the plasma's null-modem pair — is hardwired and
opened at startup, with a retry timer that keeps trying while the port
is missing or busy and reopens it if it dies. The control strip, port
picker, counters, and wire log are gone; the glass keeps two gestures:
double-click cycles the self-test pages, right-click resets the
display to its power-on state.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Cyd
2026-07-07 15:06:36 -05:00
co-authored by Claude Fable 5
parent a1b7dae3da
commit 19a1abbff2
4 changed files with 54 additions and 189 deletions
+11 -7
View File
@@ -108,8 +108,10 @@ a null-modem cable work the same way.
The cockpit's second serial device is the **plasma display**: a 128×32
dot-matrix panel on COM2 (9600 8N1, no flow control) that the game draws
mission text and status graphics on. `VPlasma.App` is its software replica:
it opens the device end of a COM port, decodes the display's command
stream, and renders the dot matrix in plasma orange — text mode included.
a bare-glass window that opens **COM12** (the device end of the plasma's
null-modem pair) on startup — retrying while the port is missing or busy,
port status in the title bar — decodes the display's command stream, and
renders the dot matrix in plasma orange, text mode included.
The command set was recovered from two Tesla 4.10 artifacts:
`CODE\RP\MUNGA_L4\L4PLASMA.CPP` (the game's driver — it renders everything
@@ -129,12 +131,14 @@ recovered grammar lives in `src/VPlasma.Core/Protocol/PlasmaProtocol.cs`.
cell, flashing text (and the flashing cursor) blink on the glass. The
panel's own ROM glyphs are lost with the hardware, so the classic
public-domain 5×7 set stands in.
- **Self test** cycles three pages (banner, charset, graphics pattern)
through the same parser the wire feeds — useful without a host.
- **Double-click** the glass to cycle three self-test pages (banner,
charset, graphics pattern) through the same parser the wire feeds —
useful without a host. **Right-click** resets the display to its
power-on state.
- Pair it with the game like vRIO ↔ RIOJoy: a second com0com null-modem
pair (e.g. `COM2 ⇄ COM12`) — the game's plasma output writes COM2,
vPLASMA listens on COM12. The plasma never talks back, so there is no
transmit path to pace.
pair `COM2 ⇄ COM12` — the game's plasma output writes COM2, vPLASMA
listens on COM12. The plasma never talks back, so there is no transmit
path to pace.
## Repository layout