Suggestion for addition to documentation

[pentode1]

I noticed a behavior after building 2 Sidkick picos that caused me a few headaches which I think could have been alleviated with a line or two in the build/installation documentation.

Basically, the symptom I was having was that the SYS command only worked very intermittently, if at all. This led me down a rabbit hole of looking for soldering faults and eventually replacing the Sid socket on one of my boards, only to continue to have the same issues.

What I realized is that while the SYS command usually just dropped to a "READY" prompt, the timing.prg would in fact run just fine, and once the timings were changed (to 11 7 in my case), the SYS command worked just fine.

I would suggest that after a quick double check of the soldering job, the user should check to see if timing.prg will run and tweak the timings before redoing the whole board three times like I did. 😀

I did ask about this behavior in my troubleshooting thread and timing.org wasn't mentioned, only soldering, which probably was never faulty in my case.

[pentode1]

As usual, after a couple days, a more concise way of describing this occurred to me.

If I flash the stock firmware on either of my SKpicos and install them in either of my test machines, SYS 54333 never works and just drops to a READY prompt. Timing.prg always runs, however, and after changing the timing to 11,7 SYS 54333 always works thereafter.

I don't know what's going on with the code but assuming there's a logical reason for this behavior, it seems to me the best test of a new SKpico would be to run timing.prg and see if that errors out, not the SYS command.

If there's some other explanation for what I'm seeing, I'd love to hear it!