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Birds Movie as XEX


Roydea6

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How is it done ? I have some ideas about converting video, but I don't know how to load it from XEX fast enough. I know about that SIDE player, but that only works with SIDE, right ?

There is a movie player that required SIDE. I think it also works with the AVG cart. I do not recall if the Ultimate 1MB is also required (as I have one). The player relies on the fact that it can DMA graphics directly to ANTIC register at roughly 500kb/sec. I can tell you, it is VERY impressive on real hardware, especially on CRT. I demoed a few movies at VCFMW in 2017, and everyone that saw it was awe struck.

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How does it work because the file size defies the odds, it feels like its instantly displaying frames and spewing the old ones out to make room for the new ones?

 

Close?

 

ie it does not load the whole file and inits straight away and then just becomes a big old frame player?

Edited by Mclaneinc
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It sets up a screen filled with the same one-line high character and places the character cell at the IDE data register's address. ANTIC's character generator proceeds to bang the IDE data register at about 500K per second. Each instance of the one-line high character causes the next byte to be pulled out of the data register.

 

There's code which sets up the reads between frames and handles the audio stream, but that's basically it.

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There is a movie player that required SIDE. I think it also works with the AVG cart. I do not recall if the Ultimate 1MB is also required (as I have one). The player relies on the fact that it can DMA graphics directly to ANTIC register at roughly 500kb/sec. I can tell you, it is VERY impressive on real hardware, especially on CRT. I demoed a few movies at VCFMW in 2017, and everyone that saw it was awe struck.

 

 

U1MB is not required, it works on real hardware, and it is one of the most ingenious abuses of Atari 8-bit hardware I have ever seen.

 

Hmmm,

 

since I do not own an SIDE cart (nor an U1MB), I never tried those movies with my real A8. But now I do own an AVG cart. and its SIDE XEX loader. So would Avery's movie player really work there ?!? I thought I read somewhere, that the movie player reads/plays raw data directly from the SD or CF card and there is no filesystem involved (so the SD or CF acts similar to a bootdisk)... is that correct ?!?

 

Or is it possible to:

 

1) use e.g. Xuel's Rasta movies (up to 128 MB long XEX files) and load them with the AVG cart. and the SIDE XEX player ?!? (Or is that impossible, since the Atari would still require more than 128MB of RAM then ?)

 

2) use Avery's movie player to playback movies on a PAL Atari 64k with AVG cart ?!? What kind of movie format is required - XEX files or raw data ? Can I use a filesystem or must the data be loaded directly off the sectors of the SD card ?!? I do not really want to dedicate my whole 16GB or 32GB SD-cards to one raw movie and would prefer loading several of them as files (XEX or other file-format) from e.g. FAT 16 or FAT 32... but I am not sure if that is possible. The Sandisk SD-cards I have can work with up to 80MB/s so -theoretically- even with a filesystem the 500KB/s should not be such a big problem...?!? (Or do we need some sort of "PDM-player" for movies then ?)

 

And last not least, would it be possible to have a player for e.g. AVG, SIDE, UNO, that can playback both movies with 500KB/s and PDM music at the same time ? (Movie data gets banged to Antic, music data gets banged to Pokey.) So we can finally do the timewarp... just a jump to the left... and then a step to the right... ;-)

Edited by CharlieChaplin
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Yes, but this clearly does not use IDE. So this is emulation only ? Even that might be interesting for testing some ideas ..

What clearly isn't IDE?

 

Regarding UNO: forget it since the existing firmware provides absolutely no external access to the SD card.

 

AVG emulates SIDE but the IDE emulation is slower than that of a real IDE controller. The emulation would also need to implement the read multi command (to read 19 sectors or however many it is all at once). So: best way to find out is to try it.

 

Currently the player doesn't support a file system, but I suggested to Avery a while ago that trimming off a few lines of the display would allow each frame including audio to fit in an 8K cluster, and if that were the case, we could cache the cluster numbers in RAM and thereby support a FAT filesystem with a nice front end. :)

Edited by flashjazzcat
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Yes, but this clearly does not use IDE. So this is emulation only ? Even that might be interesting for testing some ideas ..

 

Yeah, I think there's some confusion in this thread as people are talking about two different things. One is my bird movie XEX linked in post #1. That is emulation-only. It relies on the fact that XEX segment loads are instantaneous from the perspective of the emulated Atari.

 

The second is phaeron's excellent 60 FPS IDE video player as first announced here.

 

I agree that instantaneous XEX loads are useful for testing extreme throughput ideas. Some other examples:

 

2-bit chroma, 2-bit luma video using PAL blending:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/197450-mode-15-pal-blending/?p=2611298

 

 

4-bit chroma with 2-bit and 4-bit luma using PAL blending:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/211689-60-fps-video-using-side-2/?p=2763806

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