David VanHorn wrote:

>> 2/ In a realtime environment, say spacewars, a faster response system,
>> such as vertical counters can detect the end of the bouncing and give
>> the faster response.
> 
> Ok, I must admit  I've read the vertical counter thing, but I just don't see
> the light yet.
> Can you rephrase it maybe?

If I understand this correctly, David (Harris) is pretty much talking about
the same thing you are talking about. Vertical counters are just a code and
space efficient means to do the counting for several input pins. 

They're called "vertical" because you don't have a byte associated to an
input pin and count through the bits of that byte -- that would be
"horizontal" --, instead you have a bit associated to an input pin and
count through several instances of this bit in different bytes. Less waste
of storage (most of the bits in the "horizontal" counters are not used) and
less instructions (you may be able to read a whole port into a byte of a
vertical counter -- the data comes already in a "vertical" format).

Not sure this description was clearer :)  but it's hard to describe
vertical counters in words.

Gerhard

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