Knowledge Base

MultiTrack (Advanced): Speeding up SuperTimers for debugging

It can be quite tedious to debug programs with with delays of up to 46 hours. We have therefore included a special instruction to speed up the SuperTimers. It is called

	STScale	Factor

Factor can be a number between 1 and 255. Once that instruction is executed the SuperTimers will speed up by Factor times. For example

	STScale	60

will make the SuperTimer mechanisms run 60 times faster, so 1 hour becomes 1 minute.

There are a few cautions:

  • Only the SuperTimer timing is speeded up. The legacy timers (timers 0 to 7) do not run faster. In SPLat/PC the FastTrack timing instructions (Pause, WaitOnT, WaitOffT, WaitOnKT) when run outside of MultiTrack do not run faster but do inside MultiTrack. In real hardware they run faster inside and outside MultiTrack. This could produce wild results if you mix timing mechanisms.
  • The speed-up will inevitably produce some inaccuracies. For example, with high speed-up factors, short delays can become essentially zero.
  • A factor of 0 will stop all SuperTimer timing.