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>
The cockpit's second serial device joins vRIO: the 128x32 dot-matrix
plasma on COM2 (9600 8N1) that the game draws mission text and status
graphics on. VPlasma.App opens the device end of a COM port, decodes
the display's command stream, and renders the matrix in plasma orange.
The command set is recovered from two Tesla 4.10 artifacts: the game's
driver (L4PLASMA.CPP — ESC P packed-bitmap row writes, ESC G 0 cursor
hide at boot) and the factory test tool PLASMA.EXE, whose data segment
pairs each command literal with its printf description (BS/HT/LF/VT/CR
motion, ESC @ clear, ESC L home, ESC G cursor, ESC K fonts, ESC H
attributes: intensity/underline/reverse/flash). Text renders through
the classic public-domain 5x7 set standing in for the lost ROM glyphs;
fonts 0-3 give 21x4 cells, fonts 4-7 the doubled 10x2. A Self test
cycles banner/charset/graphics pages through the same parser the wire
feeds, and the wire log shows every decoded command.
Verified end-to-end over the second com0com pair (host writing COM2,
vPLASMA listening on COM12). The verify skill gains the cross-process
combo-box lesson: string-carrying CB_* messages hang across processes,
so select ports by locally computed index via CB_SETCURSEL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Fable 5