Debugging

 Long story short, found and squashed a few bugs.

And ever since I removed a big chunk of volatile array data that I kept to reserve space for gameplay uploads have mostly verified ok, so that's great. 

Just for the lulz (and it's usefulness when writing code from the bed) I created a DMD preview of the machine's internal DMD frame buffer on the serial terminal. It... looks a bit weird. The terminal I'm using to debug doesn't support extended ASCII or 256 colors, so I've had to be a bit creative.

But still pretty dope. :) 
I've also hot keyed flippers and start button, so I can navigate menus (and in theory) play a game as well. Of course, all previous maintenance commands like triggering solenoids, switches and lights etc still work as well. 

1) "Four-color" version. Colors turned out weird when photographing this one. 
The red shade is the same as the one below. The spelling error has since been corrected. ;)

2) Two variants; Top - two brightness values. Bottom - max or nothing. 
Having white/red was confusing so I went with the first four-color version in the end.

I won't put more effort into this, but this can be super handy to avoid having to be connected to the machine to test if game logic and various functions are working correctly. The big upside is that I can use actual code and not "log commands" that output something arbitrary to the terminal.