Analogue-sequencer

> But after a minute, strangeness ensued.  It started 
> slowing down at every button press, like my Nintendo used to do when 
> there were 20 or so moving objects on the screen.  After it had 
> excecuted the command, it went back to scrolling leds.  But every 
> button press - paging through menus, scrolling through modes, 
> changing 
> knob values etc, the machines leds would flicker and jump and I could 
> see every character appearing one after the other on the PLED.

I've seen behaviour like that with a badly wired PLED display.
This is certain to be a hardware problem, most likely around the PLED
display interface or the module itself.

> I got to the end 
> of the manual and read that F1+7 MUST be performed upon first powerup 
> of a P3 kit.  Ha..  well, I didnt do this, could it have gotten its 
> brain garbled? Note, put this in the build pages!

No - the init is required so the config makes sense, but you can't harm the
CPU by no doing it, and it wouldn't explain the behaviour you're seeing.

> I put my 9v, 600ma wallwart ono 
> my bench and it measures 13v..  why cant they get these right?  Maybe 
> my poor 7805 is burning up?  Maybe maybe maybe?

13v is typical for a 9v unregulated supply - it would drop to 9v if it were
supplying 600mA, but because less than that is drawn, the output will be
higher. The regulator will run warm, but this won't be a problem.
The regulator can happily run at a higher temperature than you can touch,
assuming you have a heat sink on there.

Cheers,
Colin f