elektraLite CP100xt Manual Part One - Manual (Page 68)

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yourself with the fixture description language is to examine the fixture library that comes with the
software.
Editing the Library.
Whenever you get a new version of the CP-100 software, it will include the latest version of the
library, in a text file called stdlib.txt. You may read this file and copy things out of it for further
editing, but you should never edit this file, because it is considered part of the software. If you wish to
tweak the way some of the fixtures work, you should copy their definitions out of the
stdlib.txt
file and put them into a userlib.txt file where they can be edited and loaded into the CP-100
separately.
Any plain text editor (such as Windows Notepad) may be used, as can any word processor that allows
a file to be stored as plain ASCII. You can edit the file on a Mac as long as you have the necessary
software for reading and writing MS-DOS format diskettes. The userlib.txt
file can be transferred
between the flash ROM and a floppy disk via commands executed from the CP-100 front panel, in the
OBJECTS
menu. Any changes, however, won’t take effect until the CP-100 is turned off and on
again, since the file is only read from the flash ROM once, on startup. If you’ve introduced any errors
into the library, the CP-100 will pause on each one and show an error message in the display, along
with the line number of the error. When you press
Ente r, it continues processing as best it can:
If the error was in a fixture type name, it will skip the rest of that fixture type definition.
If the error was in a channel name, it will skip the rest of that channel definition.
Otherwise, it will skip the rest of the line, which is why it is a good idea to put one parameter on each
line.
If you press
Undo instead of Ente r, it will continue reading the file and handling errors as just
described, but it won’t pause on each one.
If you’ve created a userlib.txt
file, and receive a new version of the CP-100 software, you may wish
to examine the new stdlib.txt file to see if any of your changes and additions have been incorporated.
If so, you may remove them from your userlib.txt file, although it isn’t necessary to do so.
Issues that you should know about.
Internally, the CP-100 uses a number to identify the type of each fixture, rather than a name, in order
to save memory. Previous versions of the CP-100 assigned numbers to each fixture type starting with
zero; whenever a new type was added to the software, the next available number was assigned.
Almost two hundred type numbers were assigned in this manner!!!!!! It was a royal pain!!!!!!!!
Starting with version 3.0, the CP-100 no longer assigns arbitrary numbers to types. While it retains the
assignments for types that were known prior to version 3.0, any new types are assigned numbers by
“hashing” the name. This means that the numeric codes for the characters in the name are run through
a mathematical formula that is designed to be unlikely to produce the same value for two different
names. This has some ramifications that the user should be aware of.