Controller demo

Posted by SpiceWare, in jEdit, ColecoVision 19 February 2012 · 449 views

I've thrown together a test program that reads the ColecoVision's controllers and updates the display to show the input. Left controller works fine, but I'm getting odd results for the right-controller. It's different for both emulators I'm using: in Mugrat (screenshots) the left controller input is also the right controller input, while in MEKA the results don't match the input keys. MEKA's input window which shows the keys is also displaying a sega controller, so who knows what they're doing :lol:

Hopefully my Ultimate SD cart will arrive soon so I can test on real hardware!

To display what's input, I copied the character set a second time to VRAM so that 0-127 are (almost) the same as 128-255. I set the first 16 color table entries to white on black and the second 16 to black on red so by using characters with bit 7 set I get the inverse red letter.

This is the first Z80 code I've ever written, so I'm sure there's much better ways do things than what I've figured out so far. Any input on that is more than welcome!

I'm also updating my coleco.z80 file with more detail as I figure out how to use the BIOS calls. The documentation I've found seems sparse, perhaps I've overlooked something. I've been figuring them out by analyzing some source files I tracked down(Get Booty and Mist Maid 4K are Z80 based, the others are C which hides the detail I'm looking for).

Source, BIN

Controller.zip (54.17K)
downloads: 48

I've also done some additional updates to the jEdit mode file:

assembly-z80.xml.zip (1.75K)
downloads: 33

tomjscott
Mar 21 2013 10:29 AM

Darrell, I'm trying to learn the Colecovision myself and I saw your source code and thought I'd give it a try. The supplied .bin file runs on the vcoleco emulator so that's a good start. I'm trying to compile the source myself so I will have a base to start programming my own stuff from. However, no luck so far. You have included a zasm file, but it's not an executable. Is that supposed to be the zasm compiler? I tried changing the extension to .exe, but it doesn't execute without complaining that the program is too large to fit into memory.