adamantyr

Another video...

That's a nice site, I love how well laid out the disassembly is! That makes conversion a heck of a lot easier. TMS9900 assembly often lends itself to a more compact listing, since we can do memory-to-memory operations, and have MPY and DIV as well. All that is critical since our opcodes do take 2 bytes each, as opposed to the 1 byte on a Z80 or 6502.

Very cool! I'd go with a cartridge design myself and 32K both. If you use sprite rotations you can mitigate the 4-sprite limit somewhat, but you'll need more than the scratchpad for that.

If we had ever had a consistent 80-column option on the TI that was widespread, I'd be all for maintaining 9938 compatibility. Otherwise, I'd say do what you need to do to make the F18A a strong platform for development. My one fear with any hardware is "Don't make me have to code different versions of things because there's multiple versions out there." This is one of the frustrations that caused Bruce Harrison to quit the TI community, and I don't blame him.

Also, I notice there are no cables shown in the picture. The power cord looks standard at least, but how does it hook up to the console? Do we know the cable standard for it?

Wow, that's a rare one... I only ever recall seeing it a few times in the Triton catalog. The single descriptive of "Looks to be in good shape" is a bit concerning though... no mention of if it's been tested at all.

Ah yes the Tenex catalog! I have a copy too. I have two slightly older ones too. It was the first place I saw Legends advertised, before Triton got Asgard software listed.

I'd love to see it!

Wait until you see the dragon...

New Video!

Yes, the LSB controls the bank. My code I had some places where I replicated the page # in both bytes, and this caused some problems with the latest Classic99 version until I cleaned it up. I didn't initially the notice the problem with the >A000 block because my game loader doesn't live there; it gets loaded into low memory. So fortunately my development work isn't blocked. I was testing sprite FX and I wanted to see how it looked on the actual TI, so I wrote a test program that required using the AMS in order to ensure the code was as close as possible to the real game. That's how I found the problem. (The sprite FX looks awesome btw.)

I'm not adding values to the existing registers, that would definitely be a bad idea. This initialization code is on the TI-Tech pages and also in Art Green's documentation. It's necessary to set up the hardware for paging to work; without it, my programs don't page. I've tried it just doing an SBO 1 without any register settings and subsequent attempts to access pages fail. On Classic99, however, you don't need to do this, it will work without it. The only hitch of late is that the current build is set to use the 32mb version of AMS and it sets register >4014 to 0 instead of A. Could I code to do that? Sure. But then it will completely break on hardware if my loaded code is in that page.

Hey all, So I have a new issue. Classic99 now has support for the new 32MB SAMS card that is coming out. But now I have code that breaks in Classic99 and works on my actual hardware SAMS card. Can someone tell me how to write this code so that it works on both systems? What's REALLY strange is I have this exact code in my game loader and it still works fine for both. Maybe the fact the loader is located in low memory helps... as written, this code seems to swap out the page where the code lives. UPDATE: I figured out the problem. Currently Classic99 is hard-coded to use the 32MB version of the card AND it also sets the page for the >A000 block to page 0, instead of page 10 which is what hardware expects. It's a hack in the code at present and probably won't be around long. LI R12,>1E00 * Set CRU for AMS LI R0,>4000 CLR R1 LI R2,16 START1 SBO 0 * Turn on AMS card page mapping MOV R1,*R0+ * Copy page assignments (0-15) AI R1,>0100 * Add 1 to each page value DEC R2 JNE START1 * Are we at end of loop? SBZ 0 * Turn off memory page mode LI R12,>1E00 * Set CRU for AMS SBO 1 * Turn on mapping mode

Happy Thanksgiving! Working the early morning shift, but I'll be in home in plenty of time for turkey...

I have both games converted to Classic99 format, drop me a PM and I'll get them to you.

I would be KEENLY interested in something like this. Just something that is light-weight and doesn't have the enormous foot would be awesome; the existing interface card isn't so much an issue as the firehose cable is.

And swiftly panic spread throughout the TI community... "NO!!!! I need Classic99!!!!"

Same as usual for me, the CRPG. At least I'm closer to finished now than I ever have been before.

I got the binaries for Super Extended BASIC, it was included in an ancient MESS module collection I got from someone way back in the early 2000's.

Really? I sell EPROMS? News to me...

Do you have the Miller Graphics EPROM's in your Corcomp controller? Those remove the original override the Corcomp controller did on the master title screen, and makes FinalGROM99 work better, along with XB 2.5.

My apologies, I should have elaborated a bit further on this! I believe that SS2 uses a different CRU banking system. I got the manuals so I was able to describe it. You also pointed out that the FinalGROM is already emulated, and is a far superior platform for bank-switching cartridges. Absolutely true. And finally, that while you could certainly take it on as a feature request, it would be very low priority and not likely to come for some time. Again, because I was literally the only person to ask about the cartridge specifically in recent memory. There simply wasn't enough of them made to create a large 99'er group who needed it.

I've got an SS2 cart myself. I chatted with Tursi once about making a compatible image for Classic99 but he was disinclined to do so because there was little software written for it and it uses a slightly different approach to bank switching.

I'm inclined to agree with this. Not only is the TIPI a superior disk system, it makes getting files from my PC to the TI so incredibly easy. No more mucking about with HDX files. Also, while the Lotharek drive IS very good, I found the Gotek drive was unable to write files from the TI back to the image reliably. I constantly ended up with corrupted images that could not be read back into DSK format.

It would be easier for me to attend if it was closer.. Mind you, I'm probably the outlier, being up in northern Washington. Somewhere in the Olympia area would be a lot easier for me to drive to. I was already driving down and getting a hotel room the night before, so two days works fine.