CSBwin/User Questions

General

DSA Editor Box

What's the DSA Group ID & Master vs. Slave

Both the numeric value and what's a slave?

SHORT ANSWER: Ignore these things.

LONG ANSWER: You can only send 12 different messages to a DSA. S0 S1 . . . T3. What would a person do if he wanted to force the player to press 13 switches in the proper sequence? Punt? Cry? No! The plan was that he could add 'Slave' DSA's in neighboring cells, each of which could receive 12 additional messages. In this way you could expand the number of possible messages. But I think it was never needed nor implemented. Subsequent features have made it easier to handle this problem without resorting to slave DSAs.

Memory Related

Global Variables

How do they work?

Global variables seem to be set up in four-banks of (up-to) 16 variables each in Edit/Global Info, the Edit Database and Global Variables in the Database Type pull-down menu, thus allowing a maximum of 64 global variables. For each of the four banks you choose the number of variables.

Assuming that I set each of the four to having two each:

• Are the valid GV indices: 0,1, 16,17, 32,33 48,49 ?
• What happens if I read/write to an invalid GV?

Variables

Q: Where are they?

What memory does the &Vn@ and &Vn! instructions access?

Instruction Related

L$

This is stated to push the location of the current master cell. What is it?

Case - syntax

I'm not understanding the syntax, could someone please provide some examples?

IfElse - syntax

I'm not understanding the syntax, could someone please provide some examples?

Flow Control and nextState

The nextState modifier of an instruction is ignore for all instructions other than the first in the sequence. How does this work with the various Flow-Control instructions, say &J*. Does the DSA keep the same state it was in (assuming no &SETNEWSTATE instructions in the called routine)?