Placing a state retired the reason the orbit check was deleted. Reaching
a given orbit through the controls takes a sustained burn while holding
height, and the phase of that burn against the gravity tick - one frame
in ten - decides whether the thruster is seen at all, so two pad files a
frame apart fly differently. The old check passed against one disk and
failed against another, which is a check measuring the boot time rather
than the physics.
Placed at eighty sideways it climbs to row 51, falls to row 190, and
climbs again to row 20 - and the turning points are BROAD, tens of pixels
across, so the samples have nothing like the margin problem the old one
had. Three claims: it climbs, it turns over on its own, and it comes
round again no lower than the first time.
Both halves of the mechanic are separately caught. Without the outward
push it sinks and lands and never climbs; without the exchange it climbs
away and never comes back, which is the one way trip the whole thing
exists to prevent.
---- And osFileRead writes whole blocks, which nothing said ----
A disk is read a block at a time, so a sixteen byte file still puts 256
bytes where it is told to. Reserving exactly the file's length writes
over whatever follows - a quiet corruption rather than a refusal, and it
looks like a bug somewhere else entirely. It cost an afternoon here: the
state buffer sat in front of the view tables, so the program read its
state, wiped the numbers every gauge draws from, and left immediately.
Said now in services.asm beside the vector and in the CosmOS manual,
along with the pattern that works: reserve the length rounded up to the
next 256, read into that, and copy the parts wanted where they are wanted.
The orbit fixture also needs its own keyboard file. The shared one holds
a key down every forty eight bytes for the held-thruster check, which
would fly this orbit as well as measure it.
Anachronaut
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