retroclouds
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Posts posted by retroclouds
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I'm thinking about doing a software project for the FinalGROM basically replacing the existing software part, while keeping the existing hardware specs.
However the things I have in mind probably will require some more memory (both RAM and flash).
Not a hardware guy, so here's my question: Can the Atmel 1284P be used as a pin and voltage compatible drop-in replacement for the 328P?
Any ideas? Has this been done before?
With the 1284P (haven't check all specs yet) it might be possible to use the FatFS module instread of the Petit FatFs module.
That one would allow you to for example create new files on the SD card (which is not possible with Petit FatFS).Obviously you would need the supporting software code to go with it, both on Atmel and on TI side.
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On 12/27/2023 at 9:50 PM, Prsa01 said:
Was a COBOL programmer on one of these in the mid 80s. The TenX board basically offloaded COBOL instructions from the rest of the system freeing it up for i/o, etc. I'm sure it also optimized the code. I do remember that it made a huge difference in overall system performance. We went from 1 to 2 of these cards and it made a noticeable difference.
Full system resources were incredibly tight. I don't remember exactly what programming limitations were but know a system being shared by ~ 20 users had maybe a meg or 2 of memory and the washing machine sized hdds were ~ 200 meg.
COBOL was actually a pretty good language for the, almost exclusively, text based business apps of the day.
That is so cool. Wish I could have been there back in the days.
Was there a special cobol program compilation step required to optimize for the TenX? Or did it run out of the box?
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Got myself an evercade VS. Fake retro, but it allows me to play Sydney Hunter. Good enough for me. The Collectorvision Phoenix is basically unobtainium, at least in Europe.
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20 hours ago, Asmusr said:
I discovered that the thing that killed performance was that I had set the target for the TypeScript transpiler to ES2022 (in May 2023 when I upgraded Angular). I did it because the Angular framework displays warnings without it, but after downgrading to ES2020, the CPU/GPU code runs just as fast as the old version of js99er did.
And overall, since I also changed the F18A VDP emulation to Web Assembly, we now have a faster F18A emulation. The Monkey Island demo uses 10% CPU time on my computer instead of 13% in the old version. 😃
So it was a good outcome in the end, but I have no idea why targeting a newer version of JavaScript degraded performance so much. My tests showed that accessing a class instance variable was 4-5 times slower in ES2022 than ES2020, which, of course, has a terrible impact on a CPU emulator. Lots of apps could unknowingly suffer from the this.
After the change, the performance in Firefox is little better overall, but it's still running at about half the frame rate for no apparent reason. I would like to find a solution, but currently I don't consider Firefox a supported browser.
@InsaneMultitasker and @retroclouds could you please check performance and report back?
@AsmusrFramerate is great, maxing out. But I guess I'm not a great candidate to test because my 12900K intel PC is overpowered and it takes a bunch of stuff to slow it down.
Having said that, there's a way to do that though (independent of the JS99er version). The bigger the log file gets, the slower it gets in the end. This is then when it starts to behave sluggish.So there's 2 topics that help getting the log to get very big: 1) The periodic framerate display, 2) The disk I/O messages in the log. This makes it especially noticeable when reading/writing large files, e.g. > 100KB
Executing DSR routine for DSK1, PAB in >0A60. DSK1.INVADERS: Input, Sequential, Display, Variable, 80 Op-code 2: READ Returned error code: 0
To fix that I have a local js99er version that has the possibility to turn both messages off.
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5 hours ago, Retrospect said:
Hi @Asmusr ... sorry it's christmas day and a bug report, this is what I get when I go onto JS99er ... is there a new URL for it now?
The TI doesn't boot , just the cyan screen, no beep.You might want to follow the same approach I did (or perhaps press CTRL-F5 as @Asmusr) proposed.
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Works again. I first tried incognito mode and that one was ok. I then checked all cookies and local storage and removed everything in there, but no luck.
At the end I just cleared the browser cache and that was the solution.
FWIW I thought it had to do with the websocket connection to my tipi, but I had already reset all there. Using the websocket with my tipi was one of the last things I used in my previous browsing session. But again might be unrelated.
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Something is wrong with the 9.7.0 version of js99er.net on google chrome.
The emulator doesn't really starts and sticks at frame 0.
Works fine on Firefox and Edge.
Tested with latest Chrome versions Version 120.0.6099.130 (Official Build) (64-bit)
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Would like to use the new DSRLNK replacing my own version in Stevie that was based on Paolo’s work.
Will not be able to do that soon, but I do have it added to my list of todo items. If I remember correctly I had to change some of the registers to make it work with spectra2 (which is the library that Stevie is based on).
So my question is, if necessary, if it would be possible to change register usage with some proper equates on my end.
Anyway, excellent work Lee!
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If someone has a picture of the card available, perhaps it can be posted here? 😃
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7 hours ago, Ksarul said:
There are probably more of them than you suspect, Dan. I actually know of about 15-20 of them in collector hands, outside of the pair I have.
Have to ask. What is a GPIB card?
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2 hours ago, Asmusr said:
Fixed. I was multiplying the start sector by 2 because the disk have more than 1600 sectors, but apparently that's not right. I think I got it from here under Allocation Bit Map.
Works great! Thanks for the quick fix 🙂
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I created a 2880 sectors disk that I cannot seem to use in js99er. When loading the disk the browser seems to freeze and cannot recover.
FWIW, the disk does work properly in classic99
Here's the disk image: -
6 hours ago, Vorticon said:
Any progress on the file directory feature? I recently found out that it would be super handy to have it instead of needing to exit Stevie and look up a directory
Oh and a key repeat feature is also sorely needed.
Unfortunately progress is slow. I know it’s a lame excuse but work has been a killer this year and is eating most of my spare time and energy.
Goal is to have a new Stevie version out the latest by the end of the year though.
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First of all I like to thank @Albert for hosting our TI-99/4a forum for so many years now.
Heck, I remember when I asked Al if we could be part here. He said sure, but you do have to find a few others TI-99’ers to join. 😁
Look how big the place has become. It’s just amazing.
Working for a corporate company for many years myself, I can understand the concerns and to be honest I’m also a little biased.
But in the end it boils down to trust. Perhaps some things will change in the long run. Some for the better, some for the worse.
No one can predict the future, but honestly my take on it is to stay cool and not to panic.
Even if Al would not have done this move, who can guarantee you that Atariage would keep on to exist?
Myself I am not in favour of moving to another forum, this will just cause more fragmentation.
In the end it’s where the community hangs out, that’s what matters.
I feel this is the next step in our communities’ journey and am looking forward seeing how it further develops.
Looking from the positive side of things, perhaps good things will come out of this.
Myself I would love to see more TI-99/4a homebrew cartridge games with nice packaging and artwork like our colecovision friends have.
And not only for games, perhaps as part of community efforts we can get more new hardware to tinker with.
Just my 2 cents.
retroclouds
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To anyone who does not have a HRD4000B, if you haven’t one try to get one.
For me it is the most valuable of all PEB cards I have. It’s incredibly stable (thanks @Ksarul) and it has so many features that I even’t have touched on.
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49 minutes ago, Tursi said:
Well, the ROMs and scratchpad you'd suck into internal memory on the accelerator anyway, though bank switching becomes an issue. Might as well pull in the GROMs too, they aren't going anywhere.
In theory you could minimize your external interface to CRU, DSR, video and sound.
If you decide to host video and sound too, well, you've pretty much got the F18A Mark II with a second-gen HDL loaded.
It's got the necessary hardware onboard, would just need to be wired in a little differently.
Only thing I keep coming back around to is "what apps does the TI have that benefit from acceleration?" Sure, we could do more, but what exists that would benefit? Chess, I guess?
It'd be neat to see for sure. I'm not sure that it wouldn't need a lot of new software to be useful. And if we want to take that route, hell with an accelerator. Let's do the PCB replacement route.
I think there some out there that might benefit from it. The ones I see are mainly those that use SAMS.
For Stevie having more horsepower would help on doing editor buffer manipulation on large files in memory, e.g. assembly source upper case to lower case, search and replace.
So far I haven't looked in using the F18a as accellerator. (In the future I'd see C compiler and assembler)-
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48 minutes ago, Tursi said:
Only thing I keep coming back around to is "what apps does the TI have that benefit from acceleration?" Sure, we could do more, but what exists that would benefit? Chess, I guess?
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8 hours ago, dhe said:
Colin also wrote an article about the TI DSR. Best explanation I've read of Level 1,2 and 3 calls. Brilliant guy and great explainer!
Might sharing that article or link to it? I’d be interested 😀
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7 hours ago, dhe said:
I'm an original owner. To this day, I'm still amazed at what this program can do, it's got more magic then any other program.
Thank you for creating it.
Same here. Also own an original Explorer Disk and manual.
ok, the manual has seen better times 😀
This is an incredible piece of software with a great manual to go with it.
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Here's something I started working on. It's in the early stages. What I have in mind is the possibility to have a file directory while typing part of a file path.
Nowadays there are many fast devices like TIPI, HDR, IDE, etc.
I would add a toggle to turn off the behaviour for "slow" devices like a floppy drive. So far I'm only using level 3 file I/O but do have to admit that on a floppy drive that is very slow.
Anyway when this works, the next step is to implement the file-picker functionality.
EDIT: also I'll have the possibility to keep showing the contents of the current directory when entering the file menu.
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Thanks Stuart. So I presume that you OCR'ed the PDF to extract the source code, did manual adjustment where OCR failed and started from there?
Reason for asking is, because the TI version has file loading/saving support you added? Do you have any plans to release your source code branch or if there are reasons preventing you from doing that?
Either way, thanks for pointing to the source PDF. It's much appreciated
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12 hours ago, RXB said:
Do you have the source code for Cortex Basic for the 9900?
As I am working on XB ROMs being modified this might be helpful?
I would also be very interested in that. Seeing how the cortex implementation looks like from the inside and what can be learnt from that.
In the last 2 years I’ve started collecting as much assembly language source code for the TMS9900 as I can.
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14 hours ago, 99V said:
I was working on an extended basic version of Vanguard and it would have been good but without marketing ability it went by the wayside like most things in life.
Do you have any plans on releasing Vanguard in the future?
Is there any source code still available? Sounds like a cool title for the TI-99/4a.
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1 hour ago, Asmusr said:
It should work now.
yes, it works fine! It's amazing to be able to navigate in Stevie with only using the mouse pointer in js99er. Thank you so much!
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In theory you could minimize your external interface to CRU, DSR, video and sound.
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Stevie Development Thread
in TI-99/4A Development
Posted
Here's a preview of the new file picker functionality in Stevie.
I am browsing some random source code files scattered accross disk drives DSK1, DSK2, DSK3
Still have to display the file types and check the filesize code again, but all in all I'm quite pleased with how easy it is to jump from file to file.
With this functionality in place I do not think I'll be adding in-memory multi-file editing. This is so fast I do not really see a need for it.
Note that I have also removed the "master catalog" functionality introduced in Stevie 1.4
Don't think it was being really being and the new catalog function just works better IMHO.
I will be releasing Stevie 1.5 in the near future (after some more bugfixing that is).