chris_rainbow

Thanks. Yes I noticed the flicker in Alley Cat but after the release. Next time

Well, I had to include the demo after the time I spent getting it to work A couple more tweaks and it should run perfectly. Hope to add DD support later. DSK are just ATR disk images without the header.

Thanks, will do!

[quote name=Sub(Function()' timestamp='1345901545' post='2585884] Hi Chris That is really good to hear. I think I registered a copy of either rainbow (or Horizon?) many years ago. It's nice to see alternatives in the emulation scene. Do you know if Richard Bannister will be porting over to Mac OS X? Many thanks for the hard work Thanks! Not sure if Richard will be working doing a Mac version... from his website he seems to have cut back his involvement with emulators.

Hi all, New features for version 2.2: - improvements to video timing - Bennet tables implemented for DMA timing - mid-scanline timing fix (e.g. Fast Eddie, Silly Things demo, Master of the Lamps) - 6502 store timing fix - VSCROL fixed - VDELAY fixed - player & missile colours fixed for GTIA modes - "Share Joystick fpr Player 2" menu item added (share a single joystick for 2 players, playing alternately) - PIA memory repeat added - PIA fixes for DCRs and data registers - menu option to turn on/off console speaker - SIO disk fixes - sound restored when window gets focus - more trace info for CPU, SIO, PIA and display options - scanline ruler added - CONSOL read fixed for 5200 (Xari Arena ok now) - 20% faster than v2.1 http://www.chrislam.co.uk/rainbow-atari-8bit-emulator.htm Regards, Chris.

Hi all, New features for version 2.2: - improvements to video timing - Bennet tables implemented for DMA timing - mid-scanline timing fix (e.g. Fast Eddie, Silly Things demo, Master of the Lamps) - 6502 store timing fix - VSCROL fixed - VDELAY fixed - player & missile colours fixed for GTIA modes - "Share Joystick fpr Player 2" menu item added (share a single joystick for 2 players, playing alternately) - PIA memory repeat added - PIA fixes for DCRs and data registers - menu option to turn on/off console speaker - SIO disk fixes - sound restored when window gets focus - more trace info for CPU, SIO, PIA and display options - scanline ruler added - CONSOL read fixed for 5200 (Xari Arena ok now) - 20% faster than v2.1 http://www.chrislam.co.uk/rainbow-atari-8bit-emulator.htm Regards, Chris.

Char name is the code of the char e.g. A is 65. Char data is the "bitmap" or 8 bytes of data which make up the image of the A.

>In fact I was simply happy that it worked finally and didn't dare to touch the code again Spoken like a true developer...

Phaeron, thanks for that. In fact thanks to all who chipped in. Silly Things pictures are now showing fine in my emulator and the transitions work, though a bit rough at the edges but that will get better in time.

I too had to add some noise at the extremes to get some games working.

You know what... I always wondered why those 8 gongs were only of 4 colours So the vscrol trick here is to stop ANTIC updating MSR. Even so each DL opcode must complete in 4 (?) scanlines and move onto the next... after all there are 30 mode 4 char lines. I thought the act of starting a new char line means an update of MSR... but clearly not. But as each data byte is DMA'ed surely MSR is incremented anyway...?

For my emulator, I'm assuming the POT value for neutral joystick position is $70. Yet some games still move on their own without any input... some also start working ok (i.e. doesn't move when no input) after a while of playing. I wonder if some 5200 games self-calibrate...?

AFAIR it is essential for 'Master of the Lamps' too. I've tried 'Master of the Lamps' but not noticed anything out of place...

I've now moved on to part 3 of silly things... the pictures. The DL here is doing the same alternating VSCROL bit trick for each mode 4 DL instruction (as discussed earlier). There are 30 such lines. The code is poking 4 into VSCROL then 12 then 4 then 12 and so on... now I'm under the impression that mode 4 chars are 8 lines high, so what happens when VSCROL =12? I'm assuming the height of the picture is 30x4=120 lines...? Thanks.

Rainbow does an instant scanline draw, not ideal I agree, but a legacy thing from the mid 90's when computers were painfully slow and so approximations were necessary to get it to run at all. Having said that this technique does cope surprisingly well with all the games (250+) I've tried with it, and where there have been glitches these were not due to lack of "cycle perfect video emulation" but other timing issues which were fixable. Any title that makes visible changes mid-scanline will break of course but a lot of software doesn't do this... which takes us back to Silly Things which will of course break during the picture transitions. You may ask why I don't just go to "cycle level" emulation... well this means re-writing the entire video emulation of Rainbow, which at the moment is not something on my Top 100 things to do before I die. However there are "cheaper" techniques like capturing video registers in realtime (e.g. using gCHBASE[114]) and then using this to render the scanline instantly as before. This seem ok on paper but problems may arise in reality.