Last night I took a trip to the location of the Spaceroom to test out some of the software on the actual machines and to get some photos of the room (as I have been promising).
The photos are available at Spaceroom Photos. Just a few pictures to hopefully give the flavor of the room.
Software testing revealed a few things, primarily in the configuration. One issue was due to a missing XML role config file. I had to recreate it from memory because I did not have it on my laptop either.
Another issue was that since the console program uses plugins it has to be compiled in a mode that requires separate runtime libraries. This then required figuring all of the required libraries. Once we got them all in place the program started up fine.
The UDP component on the Model side also needed to be configured as well. While it was set to broadcast mode, it is still necessary to set the host address to 255.255.255.255 to get it to actually work with other machines. (I had it blank before, which worked locally).
Considering that these machines are around 200MHz running Win98, (no dedicated budget here), it actually ran pretty well. At first we ran the model on my laptop and then later moved it up to one of the local machines. It seems to run well to, so that is a good sign.
Gavin, (the owner of the ship), showed me some very interesting I/O control boards that he was able to obtain. If we can get some documents on how to talk to them we can actually map the I/O controls and displays to physical controls. Much more interesting that clicking on a screen.
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