Hog laptop operation ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ DO NOT boot this machine immediately after bringing it in from the cold. Set it up but let it acclimate to interior temps/humidity for at least an hour. Make sure it's on UPSed AC power and nothing risks pulling the power cable out, as there is NO battery in this thing. Okay, so it's a wheezy old POS by now; that's no reason to disrespect it. Power/BIOS ~~~~~~~~~~ This machine's BIOS and clock battery no longer works, so if it's been powered down for any appreciable time it runs you through a long painful dance to get it going again. Power on [switch is a momentary-action slider on left edge of machine between the modem jack and fan grille, push toward rear]. You'll get loud beeps and a big "ERROR" indication. Type a . When it asks for a date/time, just bang in 2013 and hit . It doesn't need an exact date, but let's let it know what year we're in. It thrashes a little more and then freezes on a screen trying to tell you to power-cycle the machine: flickering "O off > 1 on". Power it off [momentary slide switch on left], wait about 3 seconds, power back on. You should then be able to boot. Booting ~~~~~~~ After the POST, when you see the "1 2 [1]" prompt at the top, type 1 for bare DOS 2 for windoze environment within 5 seconds. Default is to DOS, so PAY ATTENTION and type 2. After Windows boots you'll be in a command-prompt box, green text, prompt *. type "hi" [this is a batch file that sets up environment] type "dohog" [to start the Hog stuff] The HogPC application starts. *Wait* for it to do its thing, don't try to anticipate keystrokes during startup. At the first option box, you'll see a tree of directories with one highlighted in VERY light gray. Bold-type directory names mean ones that have a valid Hog show inside; normal-font names don't. The system should default to the last one used, such as maybe "a13", so if that's the one you want just type . [To select another show directory, use the up and down arrow keys to highlight it. Select SLOWLY, as for some reason the Hog system tries to access the floppy drive frequently during this process. Be patient with it while you select your show, and then type .] The two Hog windows and blue button panel come up, and a "clean start" box pops up in the right-hand window offering a choice of "new show" or "load show". Typing here loads the old show, which is probably what you want. You'll then see the board load up all the show files. Window system caveats ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Don't move the outermost window frames around, as they're set up for maximal visibility already. You have three separate windows-application level windows -- Hog 1, Hog 2, and HogPC. You can clit-mouse or alt-tab them to shift focus and visibility, mostly between 1 and 2 as due to small screen real estate they must overlap. From here you'll be working inside the *Hog's* window system, which is its own custom environment running inside the application and works rather differently from the win2k GUI itself. The board uses the backtick ` and keys as control modifiers, similar to [and along with] the familiar and . This means that to type tab-, hold down TAB and type that , just like using shift or control, and then let the TAB up. This takes a little getting used to, but understanding how the Hog app grabs and changes a lot of keyboard functionality is useful. Thus, to get rid of that "load show" window, type tab-F1 or mouse the dismiss icon in that little window [NOT the X in the purple Windows bar above, or you'll royally screw yourself and have to start over]. Frankly, learning and using the Hog keyboard mappings is far more fast and effective than trying to bang around this thing with a mouse be it the clit-button or an external one. The virtual sliders must still be moused, but that's really the only thing that *requires* mouse actions. Runtime setup ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So you're staring at two black virtual screens; now what?? To see what's going on, use the "run" view button near the top of the LH window to show the stage-output and cuelist displays. How to program or run things is different for each show, but if you're starting a rig that's already set up it should be a matter of changing to a page and moving sliders and running some cue-lists. If a show uses any of the eight playback sliders, you should individually bring each one of them down to ZERO with the mouse before selecting the show page, to keep lights from coming on full-up when you didn't want. [Leave the grandmaster under "DBO" up.] You may also have to strike [e.g. turn on the arc lamps inside] some moving-lights, as well as align their position presets if it hasn't been done for this show yet. To summarize: you need a VIEW to see what the board's doing, and you may need a PAGE to control things from. The next step is to make sure the lighting rig itself is all fired up and ready. Talking to the lights ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The board key is mapped to F8. Typing F8 should prompt "List" in the command-typein area near the bottom of the RH window. To run a given cuelist by number, type nnn . If the lights aren't powered, power them up and wait for them to reset. Test data connectivity by running cuelist 604 [as in, "see the psychiatrist, room 604"]. This doubles as a test that you are controlling the whole rig, and also makes sure the pan/tilt steppers are within the right range. For all the thrashing that the lights do when they power up and try to reset the mirrors to the right place, they still sometimes get it wrong. Running QL 604 makes sure they're uniformly in the right range and not one step out. Walk out to where you can see all the lights and make sure all the mirrors are doing the same sort of slow scan. After confirming operation, come back and type control-Z -- which maps to pig-RELEASE -- to kill the cuelist. Fire up the lamps by running list 601, and wait until it's finished. As a convenience, the last thing list 601 does is select playback number 2, so when you see the blue "light" for playback 2 go on, it's done. If you watch the rig you'll see the units open up, fire, and then close the shutters again as the board moves on to the next one[s]. All the units are *not* fired up at once, but sequenced in sensibly circuit-split groups in an effort to spread out current inrush. Thus, it's best to use the startup cuelist rather than try to turn everything on at once. At this point, you should be ready to run an existing show. Shutdown ~~~~~~~~ Control-Z to kill all the running cuelists, and then run list 610. This lamps everything down, and then self-invokes list 600 to zero all the DMX channels. You'll know it's done when you see all the mirrors abruptly swing to the side and sit there. Now you can exit the board [right-click on the blue button area and select "exit", and just type to the "have you saved your show?" question. The laptop stops sending DMX. Let the lights cool off for a little while [5 or 10 minutes] and then power them down. Alignment ~~~~~~~~~ Select the "run" view from the row of buttons across the top of the LH window. This is the easiest one to work in for aligning. This needs to be done for every new space, but only once as the positions are remembered in special "palettes" and almost everything references those when moving. Select page 6. This places a bunch of convenient lists and macros on the playbacks, which help guide the operator through the positions needing to be aligned quickly. Run playback 7 -- two cues into it the lights all fade up pink, which is the basic alignment setup. Turning on Highlight will help identify which light is being adjusted at the time, and narrow the iris [in lights that have one] to help pinpoint where it's going. Playback 1 steps through paired groups of lights in a similar position, allowing fast rough-in if they're more or less together already. Playback 2 runs through dancefloor alignment, 3 does stage, 4 does some concept of matched levels [probably not needed] and 5 runs through focus parameters in the 918s [and kicks master 7 to swing things around to make that easier]. As each position or set of attributes is re-established, use to save it and then the macro to move to the next one. SAVE THE SHOW after the alignment/preset is done, or it will all be lost. Palettes are saved into the files on disk. Channels may also need to be repatched. Use , or the SETUP key, then the "Patch" softbutton to reach the patch screen. Note that the syntax is backward from most boards that specify dimmer first -- here it's "1 @ 16" to patch control-channel 1 to *dmx address* 16. Patch needs a show-save to disk once completed too. Running subtleties ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It is good practice to gratuitiously press a lot and let it back up without typing other things in combination. This reaffirms that the state of the "pig" key, mapped to , is UP. The board often gets confused about the state of that key, and if it gets confused enough it can lead to crashes. So set it straight every so often. Especially after switching back in from another application, which may have grabbed some different key state within windoze. As the virtual controls are moved, additional images are loaded from disk to be displayed. "Working" all the wheels, choosing each master in turn, and toggling Blind and Highlight and such will get these images into memory cache and decrease the need for disk access when used later. So run through the controls a little bit before actually going to do real work. If you aren't familiar with the mapping of board keys to PC keys but want to learn and save yourself a *helluva* lot of time by not having to mouse everything, right-click on the blue board window across the bottom and turn on the tooltips. Sometimes the pop-up legends make no sense, but remember that they're thinking UK keyboards instead of US. See the keyboard layout chart near the back of the manual for better hints on what maps to what. At this point, advice on how to best run things gets *really* squishy and complex, and is probably way beond the scope of these basics. But here's some text about it anyway. Select one of the other "view" buttons, depending on what you need to do. Run cuelist 101 to bring up conventional lamp preheat, check for happy glow in your instruments, and you're ready to rock. The values and/or addressed channels in list 101 may have to be changed per-show. Select which cuelist page makes sense for the event. For clubby stuff, pages 12 and up flip between various "mood selections" to mix and match. Too hard to explain here, really; a weak start at doing so is below. For fake- followspot mode, use page 3 which binds the chase-them-around-on-the-stage lists to the playback masters. Use view "busk 4" to access a bunch of canned stuff that masqueraders might like. Staying on page 3 but using view "busk 4" is useful for designing cues, but if a separate cuelist needs to be written for an entrant it should be saved in a list from 1 to 49 and later accessed in the "msq 3" view. To build a cue, use the "Active" key to suck in whatever's running and start saving to the list. The list will have to be edited so that the first one becomes a setup cue with intensity knocked out, and the second one brings the lights up. Optionally, a third and fourth can bring lights out again, and then self-kill the list. Followspot mode ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Some additional info about how page 3 works. The stage is set up like a 5 x 3 grid, with the USL and USR positions assumed as being sort of "in the wings" where a spot would either start from on entry, or go to on exit. Thus, those positions are also programmed with a fadeout. The five lists reflect five areas across the stage, with master 3 in the middle. Each list has 3 cues, to move 1> downstage 2> middle 3> upstage. Thus, as each cuelist starts, you punch it more times to "push" the talent upstage away from you. To keep someone upstage but moving back and forth, for example, you'd follow with masters 2, 3, 4 and hitting each one three times quickly to keep the "upstage" positions invoked on each move. Lists wrap around, so if the talent suddenly runs downstage you can just hit the same list again and the lights will follow. The extra copy of the cuelist directory window over the masters is for convenience in selecting spot colors. Preset them in black, of course. Clubby meta-structure ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This is still in development, but in a nutshell, cuelist pages select "moods" of fast, slow, static, all-the-same, transitions, etc etc. The lists bound to the masters at any time are meta-lists with no actual contents, except that each cue contains a comment macro that kicks some *other* list to actually run things on a virtual master. The meta-lists are done as random chases at 1bpm [the slowest possible], so kicking them manually jumps to another random cue [and thus a random driver-list gets kicked] and otherwise they just hang out. If you don't type anything and don't select a new page, they *will* continue changing things after a minute goes by. The driver lists are grouped such that they explicitly kill off the relevant neighbor lists around them, so that only the lists producing the current look on the floor should be running at any time. [That can still be several lists, since shutter/movement/color/gobo/fx are all still separate and there are more than one type of light.] Master 8 is special on all these pages, and master 8 should remain *chosen* while running any of this. [List 100 periodically enforces this.] M8 is the beat-matcher. This allows "main go", i.e. ] or spacebar, to approximate a tap-sync function -- except that it's a phase-lock-loop more than a tap sync, and takes a while to sync up. You provide an approximate one-second "heartbeat" on beats of the music, and it drifts the entire board speed up or down to get closer to that. Use this liberally to match beat rates -- it's way more accurate than trying to just set the console rate manually. If you stop tapping, it exits after 4 seconds but holds the last rate you reached with it. Start up list 101 [preheat] manually and just let it sit there. Start list 100 for manual control, which cleans up any meta-meta "autopilot" stuff, selects Master 8 for convenience, and then hangs out in the background to prevent the meta-driver chases from triggering by themselves. Kick lists 107 or 108 every so often yourself to change the DJ lights -- in general you need to leave some light on the DJ so don't kill them entirely. If you happen to type ^Z to kill everything, you need to restart these few basics. 101 [preheat] 100 [manual-mode] 107 or 108 or 109 [DJ lights] Besides specifically selecting pages, the "next page" [mapped to semicolon] can be used to walk forward or back in the group. Use PIG-nextpage to go backward. Pages 11 and 30 are "wrap points" -- constructed to run little lists that automatically wrap around the ends of the group, so you have less chance of wandering outside the dance-run page group by mistake. For full autopilot, such as for bathroom breaks, start list 99. That will randomly auto-kick the metas on the current page, in various intervals of 8 and 4 seconds. Start list 98 to automatically swap pages too. Someone should still be nearby to correct the beat-sync using main-GO if needed. If none of this makes *any* sense, don't feel bad; just understand that it's been *years* in development. _H*