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[Aquarius] Any one still active?


barnieg

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I've not been well recently so have not been very active, I have some time off work to recover so am looking at restarting projects. One project in particular is Robotwon for the Aquarius. As I'm limited by the physical platform I'm considering more efficent ways to develop and test accurately on a low budget.

 

Has any one sucesfully run the FPGA Aquarius that was done some time ago, would it be viable to port to the MiST platform?

 

 

Finally anyone else still using the Aquarius or continuing development of projects?

 

Barnie

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What emulation is available for the Aquarius and is it accurate? Are you intending to develop in assembly language or BASIC (or even C)?

 

Thesw days, all of my retro coding is tested in emulators with only occasional testing on the real machine. That makes development much easier in my mind because I can use better debuggers (and text editors and other tools) and I don't need to be located near the target hardware. Perhaps that would work for you too?

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I've not been well recently so have not been very active, I have some time off work to recover so am looking at restarting projects. One project in particular is Robotwon for the Aquarius. As I'm limited by the physical platform I'm considering more efficent ways to develop and test accurately on a low budget.

 

Has any one sucesfully run the FPGA Aquarius that was done some time ago, would it be viable to port to the MiST platform?

 

Finally anyone else still using the Aquarius or continuing development of projects?

 

Welcome back and I hope you will be fully recovered very soon.

 

I am not aware of any such FPGA Aquarius project, could you point me to it?

 

Furthermore I think Bruce is still trying to finish his 2 hardware projects and I am sure Jay is still doing some background work on either a software or maybe even a hardware project, but he never reveals to much beforehand as you may know.

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What emulation is available for the Aquarius and is it accurate? Are you intending to develop in assembly language or BASIC (or even C)?

 

Thesw days, all of my retro coding is tested in emulators with only occasional testing on the real machine. That makes development much easier in my mind because I can use better debuggers (and text editors and other tools) and I don't need to be located near the target hardware. Perhaps that would work for you too?

 

Assembly and C (z88dk) with rexpaint to create graphics are dev tools and virtual Aquarius running under wine on Linux.

 

I also have a real Aquarius with 16K RAM but no means of getting programs over to it for testing (I'm considering wiring up a casette interface to mp3 player solution but that will be slow)

 

I dont think Virtual Aquarius is accurate to hardware level and I want to push the machine a little more (think attempting tricks that have been used on the spectrum such as interupting the scanline to get more colours in an attribute block)

 

Obviously solutions are pending from others to make program transfer easier but money is tight at the moment :)

 

Maybe I should release early/ release often for others to test on real hardware?

 

Any advice on the above would be welcome

Barnie

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Welcome back and I hope you will be fully recovered very soon.

 

I am not aware of any such FPGA Aquarius project, could you point me to it?

 

Furthermore I think Bruce is still trying to finish his 2 hardware projects and I am sure Jay is still doing some background work on either a software or maybe even a hardware project, but he never reveals to much beforehand as you may know.

 

 

There was one available to download on the yahoo group but I tried to access files today and it timed out, I'm not sure how accurate it was but I wanted to see if it is viable for porting to the MiST platform. Did anyone archive the yahoo group?

 

The other reason to get the Aquarius running on the Mist platform is that if a viable FPGA core is ported is it should be able to make it compatible with the new capabilites provided by Bruce and Jay :)

 

Note: Z80 and AY implementations are already available and the MiST handles a lot of the controller logic

 

I may have to sell some retro stuff due to tight finances for the next month or so but I would be willing to donate a proportion of the sales to fund a MiST for FPGA development if anyone thinks this is a viable idea

 

 

Barnie

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I also have a real Aquarius with 16K RAM but no means of getting programs over to it for testing (I'm considering wiring up a casette interface to mp3 player solution but that will be slow)

If you have some electronics knowledge you can take a game/app cart from BITD and convert it to a RAM based cart. If you then add a supercap and a microcontroller, it can be programmed from your PC via USB (using serial). Its a bit of work but that will get you a good dev solution.

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I'm still here, and I've got a lengthy list of Aquarius projects waiting for me, but I got hit by a crushingly rushed and busy summer schedule this year: a software development project, teaching at two professional development workshops, preparing for a Windows 10 workstation upgrade in our classrooms and labs, on top of the usual responsibilities of teaching that keep us busy even during the summer months (prep for next year's classes, student advisement, a paper or two to write, etc). Good experiences, to be sure, but miserable when it comes to finding time for hobby projects. Most of the ideas that I have are the same ideas that have been rattling around in my head for over two years now, but I think I'm finally getting to a point where I can begin to make some progress on them.

 

The first thing I want to finish (mainly because most of it is already done) is a graphics editor for the Aquarius. Choosing game projects for the Aquarius depends heavily on what can be done with its character graphics, so I want to create a "screen builder" similar to the old TheDraw for DOS (the "ASCII art" program that was used to create BBS character graphics back in the day). That will make it easier to experiment with screen designs, and eventually, simple animations. I also plan to be able to export multi-screen projects to a cartridge image so they can be viewed in slideshow fashion on a real Aquarius.

 

The ability to download cartridge images to the Aquarius, so that games can be tested on real hardware, is a huge missing piece in the Aquarius toolchain. I've experimented with some all-in-one USB I/O bridge chips, and I think I've settled on one which should interface nicely with the hand controller ports. Eventually, it will become a USB PC link cable that you can plug right into the Player 2 port of the Mini Expander. I have a preliminary design for a 512K RAM cartridge and a data transfer utility; I just need time to put it all together and test it.

 

I also have some game ideas in mind (and I've floated a few of them here in the past), but I don't want to say too much about which one I'll tackle first, because I hate making promises that I might not be able to deliver. One thing's for sure: it bothers me greatly that I've been sitting on my Aquarius gatefold boxes for nearly three years now with nothing tangible to put in them. Not for much longer, hopefully ...

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There was one available to download on the yahoo group but I tried to access files today and it timed out, I'm not sure how accurate it was but I wanted to see if it is viable for porting to the MiST platform. Did anyone archive the yahoo group?

 

I have this one file from the Yahoo groups, which I downloaded somewhere in 2008. I am not sure if this is the one you mean, because I never found use for it?

Aquarius_in_an_FPGA.zip

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I have this one file from the Yahoo groups, which I downloaded somewhere in 2008. I am not sure if this is the one you mean, because I never found use for it?

 

Brillant that's the one :) Basically you need an FPGA board to run the core. If someone has one of the boards this core was written for it, they could run this. I've got a MiST box https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki/GettingStartedand I wanted to see if it was viable to port the core to the MiST

 

I will have a look at the documentation tomorrow but I am at the very early stages of looking at how to develop for fpgas, in the meantime anyone with FPGA experience able to comment?

 

Barnie

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