chjmartin2

I have one and recently had to change out a chip. I have been trying to program it. A bit stuck at the moment but having fun. I, too, am sad that it didn't get more of a following. This is a powerful system (especially for its time) and had we gotten the creativity we had on the Atari 2600 there would be incredible games for it. The 160x100 resolution is certainly less than the 2600 160x192 but 4K of ram, built-in graphics functions, etc. For sure somebody would have come up with bankswitching. The games we could have had.

Is the data chip the one that has the goop all over it and has a bar attached to the RF shield that floats above and doesn't make contact so it doesn't do anything? When you say Gorilla Glue, which one do you mean? Can I use any other kind of heat sink adhesive?

All, Attached for your use is an image converter for the Bally Astrocade. It will take an input image (BMP, PNG, JPG, GIF) and resize it and color optimize it for use on a Bally Astrocade. The Bally Astrocade displays 160x100 pixels using 4 colors out of a 256 color palette. There are a myriad of features: Full Windows GUI Based Application Input Images of Any Resolution in BMP, PNG, JPG, GIF Two Image Scaling Methods - Nearest Neighbor (sharp edges, cartoons) & Average (smooth, photos) Grey Scale Filter Diffusion Dither (Floyd-Steinburg) with Intensity Control Bayer Dither (4x4 matrix) with Intensity Control Custom k-Means Color Quantization using Bally Palette, first pass and refinement manual control Random Optimized Palette Selection Custom Color Picker to Manually Control Palette Selection Scaled Input/Output Preview Outputs an 8K BIN file ready for use in MAME emulator Outputs a 64K BIN replicated file ready to burn to a 64K EEPROM for hardware use Custom made input images included for testing I am happy to implement other features for those interested. I know I want to change the output code to pick a destination directory. I want to add a drop down to choose the output type and to add a text based output of DB for image data and palette code. Thanks, Chris Pictures show: User Interface, Color Picker, Hardware Output on CRT via RF with Astrocade, Direct picture of CRT BallyImageWorks.zip

Success! The first image is the original input image, the second is the output of the converter, the third is Mame and the fourth is from the Bally. I think my Bally may actually have bad colors. I am going to recap it although I have no idea if any of those impact color. It is POSSIBLE that I may have my hex color codes wrong but I have checked them a bunch of times and I get this from the NTSC test program: I would love it if somebody could run the attached file on real hardware as a comparison. Gargamel.zip

First one is what my program thinks it is going to generate. The second one is what MAME says I generated. The third one is what it looks like on real hardware. The colors are not the same as what I have as a system palette. I don't know if it is my TV, if it is the capacitors in the Bally (not likely.) The true to life and my calc picture are much closer than what MAME shows but I have heard that is a known issue in MAME. The work continues. I am just excited that I got a picture on the screen from my converter. Chris

Hi, The below images are palate matched to the colors available in the Bally 256 color palette. Next step is to encode them to display as a bitmap. I'm nervous that the available pal RGB values are not accurate, but, we will see what happens soon. But without reservation I believe the below images could be displayed on a Bally. Chris

You are still on this side of the ground man. It is never too late ...

I saw them! Believe me, the premise of a 512k bank switching cart is enticing for sure. The backbit pro could probably be modified/utilized to get to 1 meg (or more) with bank switching. For the 512K cart did it bank switch the entirely of the 8K of ram or was it switching 4K at a time. I'd really rather reserve the 4K for execution code and cycle through in 4K chunks using one byte would give you a meg of memory. Two bytes would give you over 200 meg. Anything in between would be clumsy programming but could be done. Curious how the 512K cart worked as I don't yet fully understand the memory map of the Bally or what the Z80 sees. But regardless, I would like to conquer some 8K stuff first. I have another system calling to me at the moment as well, so my plan is to make the bitmap converter, one enhancement and then move on and come back. So many ideas, so little time.

Hi, I am going to be taking on the challenge of writing some demo type projects for the Bally Astrocade. I am very impressed by the capabilities of this very old machine. I can't believe it was released at the same time as the Atari 2600 and was so versatile. I have gotten lots of help setting up my development environment. I am excited to say that I have a modified cart that run 2764 eproms. The good news there is that I can use a W27C512 64K EEPROM by replicating the 8k data 8 times. This means I can compile and run on hardware in a few seconds. My development rig is about 2 feet from my Bally, so rapid testing is possible. I don't know if what I will attempt will not be able to be run by an emulator but of course I'll start there. I'm not sure what projects I want to pursue but task one will be to make a general purpose bitmap converter. Bally Smurf Demo using Modified EPROM Cart with EEPROM Below are some images that I think we can create on the Bally. The palette isn't selected yet but I am sure there are close enough colors among the 256 we have. The program uses K-Means Color Quantization to find 4 good colors for the image. My first goal is to use the Smurf Demo program as a basis but make a general converter for public use. We'll see how far I get. Thanks, Chris

Hi, I just set up my Astrocade after some time, and of course played every game on it in one day and now itching to bang out some Z80. Has anybody developed a bank switching cart for it? If not, anybody got some easy ideas on a port that isn't used that the cart has access to? We could also pick a single memory location and watch it for a specific value. It isn't important right now, but based on my "plans" it would prove useful. Lastly, on the Backbit it says the max rom size is 8k, same question, anybody thinking about a hack to allow for a much larger ROM size. Should be straightforward as it has been done extensively on other systems, but I am not a pro for sure. Lastly, has anybody clocked the Z80 to see how many palette changes can be done per line? I know you can do the split screen, was wondering if anybody has done it on the fly. Looking forward to doing some work on this, first step is to figure out how to get the "IDE" setup and bang out some stuff on an emulator. I may buy the Backbit just to run code although it looks easy enough to mod a cart and put a ziff socket on a board - there is nothing to them, looks like straight run. Thanks, Chris

Here are some examples of the output from the latest "engine." The lowest left is the brute force result and the lower right is the gradient output result.

Hi, As I am coming back to the Aquarius after a long hiatus, mostly due to the fact that MESS is providing a very good development tool, it will be even more so if @Pernod emulates @Bruce Abbott's Mini-Expander. With support for @jaybird3rd's Super Cart in MESS and with Matt Pilz's Aquarius Draw tool we now have a lot of tools at our disposal for the lowly Aquarius. Anyway, I went back and looked at a lot of the stuff I spent time on now more than a decade ago, and I am so thankful for everything that this forum has enabled me to learn. It forced me to learn Freebasic (a powerful development tool that compiles Window 10 compatible code and is pretty fast), forced me to learn a bit of Z80 assembly and therefore got me a lot closer to the processer, and forced me to learn a lot about image manipulation. My work on the Aquarius spawned a number of other cool bits here and there and some of that passion continues. Anyway, when I saw that even now some people use the BMP2AQ tool and thinking through all of the things I have learned since then, I have decided to modernize the tool, make a proper Windows GUI for it and have a myriad of use selectable options. In an ideal setup I would like to output files that can natively be pulled into Matt P's on-line editor for touch up and finalization. This project is going to take me quite some time. I will confess that I write really lazy code. I have never made an application that makes calls to Windows routines outside of the file open dialog box. I do not use proper subroutines. I overuse the goto statement. I write code in "FBLite" mode. I'm not even really sure exactly what a pointer is, except that it "points" to a memory location. In short, my code is an absolute jumbled mess - but it works. For this project my goal is to do everything right. Have a proper set of functions and sub-routines. Utilize the Windows GUI. Allow scalable windows. Pop-up dialogues for important tasks. A true "File, Options, About" menu bar. Good solid commented code, AND, for the first time I am going to try to use GITHub as a repository for the code and the project with version control. (That's another thing I am absolutely horrible at...) In order to step up my game, I need some advice from the small but passionate Aquarius community. (By the way, can you convince your Facebook Aquarius group friends to come hang out here, I don't have a Facebook, and I know the yahoo group used to be "the place" but it seems the FB group is the most active Aquarius users.) Anyway, here are the features that I plan to implement and would like feedback, feature set asks. I'll also post GUI mock ups, etc. Here are my preliminary design features that I would like to implement: Open Image Formats JPG PNG BMP GIF Preprocessing Brightness Contrast Red/Green/Blue (adjust RGB levels) Bit Reduction (reduce incoming bit-depth) Scale/Crop/Reposition (zoom in on a face for example) Scaling Nearest Neighbor (pixels!) Averaging (smooth downsample) HQX (for upscaling) Character Options Full Character Set 2x3 Bloxel Set 2x2 Bloxel Set Graphics Set (all non-alpha-numeric, symbolic characters) Gradient Set (blank, full, checkerboard, two stochastic chars) Processing Options Full Brute Force (Cycle through each 8x8 pixel block and determine lowest sum or squared differences of RGB values to every char/col combination) Character Averaging (Downscale Input Image to 40x24, take average color of target character set, match closest) Bloxel 2x3 Scale & Render (Downscale Input Image to 80x72 and use 2x3 bloxels) Bloxel 2x2 Scale & Render (Downscale Input Image to 80x48 and use 2x2 bloxels) Black and White (Convert to 1 bit image) Color & Character Two Pass (Choose Colors first, then characters) 60 Hz Flicker (Create two screens when flickers at 60 Hz, somewhat 320x192x136 color mode) Dither Enabled/Disabled Diffusion (Floyd-Steinburg, Atkinson, Jarvis, Stucki, Burkes, Sierra) Pattern (Small Checkerboard, Large Checkerboard, 2x3 Bloxel) Bayer (2x2, 4x4, 8x8) Output Options Basic Code Data Statements Uncompressed Basic Code Data Statements RLE .ASM Code .CAQ Output .BIN Output .JSON for use in Aquarius Draw In many ways this is a very ambitious project for me. I would like to contribute a better tool to help development and to improve the quality of images on the aquarius. In my next comment I will share a bit of a teaser showing how I have already improved on the image conversion algorithm used in the BMP2AQ and post a few examples of output using the Brute Force and Gradient methodologies mentioned above. Thanks, Chris

So where is @Bruce Abbott, as I think he would be excited to see you work in developing Mame to support the Mini-expander! I know that I am. All this Aquarius activity has be itching to pull my Aquarius out - it is super small - I have to be able to find a way to get it on my desk.

Yeah, so I have not used the stack at all in any of my programs and this is an application I want to get better at. I think I will try to create a 4x3 frame animation demo to see exactly how fast I can get it to run. 190 t-states is MUCH faster (like 60%) than my unrolled loop code.

So help me with that because I am very interested in it. I don't know what stack blasting is, nor do I know how to auto-modify code. Is there somewhere I can read about it?