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My game-related blogs

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Roland VG-99

Must have now.   http://www.rolandus.com/products/productde...px?ObjectId=849   If the 12-string patch sounds more realistic, I probably didn't need to have my doubleneck built. However, there is something really nice about the sympathetic vibrations you can create with two sets of strings, especially with open tunings. I've got to record a sample of that in action because it's almost like the tones you get from rubbing a wine glass. I installed an onboard preamp a few weeks ago to help

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iPhone

I was up late last night catching up on Steve Jobs' keynote. Man, that iPhone is a real piece of engineering. I'm tempted to call it a UMPC, although you probably won't get as much utility out of it as you would from a full computer. What's really annoying about "embedded" devices is they are reluctant to quote specs. Nobody knows what kind of CPU is in this or how much RAM it uses. All we know is the storage is 4 or 8GB of flash and it uses a cut-down version of OSX. I was just struck at

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Other responsibilities

Real life has intervened such that neither myself nor Delicon were able to work on Chimera. Hopefully some time this week or the following weekend we'll get the text mode up.

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PCB orders

As of Monday the revision 10.0 board and the dongle board orders have been sent in. I don't know exactly how long it will take to get those boards back but I'm expecting a total turnaround time of about 3 weeks when you factor assembly and shipping into the mix. That means we have to try to make the most of things in the meantime. I have my repaired 9.2 board and the next step is to get the menu display up and running. I hope to report success on that front by Sunday evening.   I am really

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Dongle boards

Here is a gallery of the PCB designs for the dongles we'll be offering.

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Verion 10.0 status

Right before thanksgiving I started a forum topic Chimera Queues Brainstorming. The concensus there was that the LPC2103's limited RAM and the slow SRAM speed was going to constrain the system too much. This caught me a little off-guard and has caused me to change priorities. I didn't want to significantly increase the cost of the cart to add extra hardware that was not needed by the Supercharger subsystem. With the 2103, I think we could say we hit that sweet-spot. But by moving to the 236

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Protecting the cartridge

Thought this would be a good time to post a progress report with Chimera...   There were some complications delaying the completion of the PCB layout for Chimera version 10 (the LPC2368 version).   First off, we're using a 2-layer board and that is asking a little too much to accomodate the larger ARM chip and the extra signals (known as the Super Wide Bus between it and the CPLD. We spent time debating what to do with the center screw-hole which was cramping the connections and whether we

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Atari 2600 "DOS"

Another thing Delicon and I were discussing was how to handle the native Chimera file format. We decided that the best approach is for a Chimera game to load in a 4K "loader" which in turn instructs the ARM where to get the rest of the data and where to put it. While this adds some extra overhead to the game, it is the most flexible approach, and closer to how a modular program for an 8-bit home computer would work. Since the ARM would have the ability to use the FAT filesystem on the flash,

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Pitfall II Sound

When Delicon sent me a link on the LPC family of ARM chips, it was a real eye-opener because of how ideal they looked to enhance the 2600. In a recent blog post I talked about how we should be able to get the ARM to support two extra controllers with accelerated paddle reads. That is made possible by virtue of the ARM's many GPIO pins and how they can be reconfigured on the fly, as well as its built-in ability to sample analog signals. In addition to that, it also has the ability to make wave

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Queue timings

We have a new proto board. I'm still waiting on my copy, but Delicon did some work on it over the weekend and I'm happy to announce that we've managed to reach the necessary timing constraint of 4 cycles between all queue reads.   Just to review, we had a hell of a time getting the ARM to be able to access the SRAM quickly through the CPLD. This was potentially going to make the queues in SRAM unusable if you couldn't sequentially read them. Now you can do something like this safely:   LD

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Multitap

There is more going on than just this, but I thought I'd just post this tidbit for now.   I had a discussion with Delicon yesterday and discovered that the ARM is more flexible in how it handles IO than previously thought. I was under the impression that its pins were already accounted for. As it turns out, the IO lines that are currently assigned to the two UARTs, I2C, and SPI can be reassigned at runtime, and that there are enough unused GPIO pins that they can be swapped in their place.

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Peripherals

One thing that we had been discussing earlier in the week was how to interface with peripherals. I was in a search for serial devices that could hook up directly to Chimera. So that meant things like old serial mice or the Stowaway keyboard for palm devices. But Delicon tells me he can create a PS2 to RS232 adapter that will work for us. This adapter makes sense. Even though it's an added expense, it beats having to pick up legacy or specialized serial devices. I would think people are lik

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Next demo

While waiting for the new board, Delicon has agreed to work on the text engine this week.   For the proof of concept, I'm only asking that he preload the fast queues with a fixed text message utilizing the extracted Atari 8-bit home computer font.   I have a 7-bit character kernel ready for this use. I have been so far unable to apply Supercat's advice to modifying the kernel to be 8-bit gapless. I was kinda hoping he'd do the honors for me However, I've begun finally get more familiar

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Queue timing

This weekend Delicon and I were on a quest to finalize the queue functionality, mainly to minimize the latency in processing queue functions.   There are three discrete queue functions.   READ WRITE SEEK   Also, there are two groups of queues. FAST queues which run out of the ARM's internal RAM. There are only 16 of these, hence 4K out of the 8K of ARM RAM. Then we have SRAM queues, which can use up to 64K of space. The way we're limiting the hotspot footprint, we currently plan on t

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Chimera board revision 9.1

I thought I'd give people a look at the newest Chimera board revision:     In addition to a test points on an internal header, there are two 10-pin headers. Each 10-pin header supports 4 serial lines (RX, TX, CTS, RTS), power, and some extra signals presented on the right of the dongles.     Sorry, my camera doesn't do macro well.   The serial at the headers is TTL and gets converted to RS232 level by the dongles. So if you want to interface serial devices at TTL, you can still do

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Chimera update

Earlier in the week we were able to verify that Supercharger games are working again. I haven't tried any multiloads other than Survival Island, but odds are, we're good to go on that front.   Next, we've been able to get bidirectional serial communications working. We wrote a test program that lets you type characters in Hyperterminal and have them echo back after reaching the VCS.   Next, we were able to get queues working again (I don't think I'll call queues Ouroboros anymore, it's too

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cancellation notice

This is another notice to let people know that I cancelled the contest. I only had 2 official bBasic entries. I am impressed with the amount of coding going on with bBasic but the language is in flux and the best is clearly yet to come.   I think that once Chimera comes out there might be an upspike in interest in Supercharger development or at least development against the new features of the cart. So stay tuned there.

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Cingular 8125

My phone broke over the holiday weekend (a wave crashed over it at the beach, salt water and phones don't mix well). I decided when I got another phone it was going to have to have a keyboard and the ability to termserv to my workstation. I was expecting to get a Treo 700p but the Cingular rep showed me the 8125:     I think it's really encouraging where phone technology is headed. The PDA is definitely merging with the phone and I couldn't be more pleased. The fact I was able to get th

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Chimera Teaser continued - Ouroboros

Besides using the ARM as a coprocessor, the big feature we're working on are the queues. I'd like to call them Ouroboros but that is kind of a long name. It's hard to get used to it. David Crane calls them "data fetchers". Other people have called them "stacks".   If you aren't a programmer yet or if you are a novice, you might not see the value in these, so I'll try to explain the rationale. There are three big advantages to Ouroboros, speed, simplicity, and compactness.   Let's review

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Origami

I thought I'd comment on the Origami hype from Microsoft and Intel.   There are people out there who just don't "get" the UMPC. That doesn't mean these things won't sell. They just won't sell to them. Nevertheless, they love to talk like they know what's best for us.   I read Slashdot a lot and ironically a lot of people there, as technologically savvy as they may be, when it comes to talking about mobile devices, start waxing lyrical about their old B&W Palms with no wireless capabil

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Chimera Teaser (Part 2)

Here is another Chimera teaser for you.   Ever since the end of the summer, Delicon and I have been hashing out a hardware specification for this cartridge. We knew we didn't want to do audio loads. We wanted to do serial. Serial would be easier to implement. Audio loads would probably have required a more complicated programmable logic chip like what is in the Cuttle Cart. That would be too expensive. With serial, we could use a dedicated microcontroller on the cartridge which had seria

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Chimera Teaser

I've posted about this a few times on AtariAge but I thought I'd reveal a little bit more here on my blog now that there have been some recent developments...Along with my Supercharger programming contest, I'm trying to bankroll the production of a Supercharger replacement cartridge, codename Chimera. Delicon is doing the hardware design. I will do some of the VCS firmware code, at least initially, and I'm helping make decisions on features and the programming model.The goal of this cartridge

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Flashback2

My ex sent a gift package for my daughter which included a Flashback 2. So I finally got a chance to play it. Boy what a disappointment. Games like Frogs and Flies have have screen flipping problems. The new titles all are flicker-fests in the worst way (except for Dennis Debro's game of course). Not only do the new games flicker, but they flicker in a way that seems totally unnecessary. Like the playfield walls in Caverns of Mars. I mean, isn't Caverns of Mars basically River Raid going

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