karri

It is really nice that you take the time to improve the serial tools. Adding the Lynx features to cc65 was done in a hurry and I had very little experience about ComLynx at the time.

Actually the 2600+ is really well built. If I had the desire to replace the Rockchip with a fpga based system I would just create electronics to fit in the 2600+ case. But I am happy with the emulation as it is.

Kids were here today. Pauls Happy bird and Slideman in mazeland.

I have a habit of ordering enough boards for a small hobby release. Usually 40 or 50 boards is ok. The price difference between just ordering a few boards is not big as DHL from China costs the same anyway. It is also nice to have one physical copy of every homebrew release I have done so I may have use for a few boards myself. The rest are available...

The tread is about making your DYI flash cart so of course there can be different varieties. There is still a long way before Otaku will be able to support Exaudio. But I hope to get there.

The Otaku board has 7800 pins. And exaudio is connected. Or do you comment on some other board in this thread?

Wow! You are much further in your thoughts than me. I am interested in POKEY and Yamaha 2151 sound emulation. - these chips are common in flash cards - the Atari 2600+ emulates them in software - they are both supported by Furnace Tracker - there is fpga cores available for both chips Having the Pico supporting these chips would be great! It would open emulation of modern homebrews. I really love the idea to use the DMA and the PIO engine for creating this functionality. So I am in! Could we do it in this Otaku github?

The Tiatracker is really easy to use. It is very practical for small games. A shoot them up for 4 players? Medieval Mayhem with 4 paddles for the 2600 was a nice game at retro events. Something similar for the 7800 would be great!

I believed that the parity was wrong for a long time until I tried to communicate with a PC. A really long time ago I wrote a Windows 3.1 program for communicating with the Lynx. It even had automatic BLL loading. For some strange reason it worked with all Windows versions during the years. This works with any USB serial dongle using FT232 kind of chips. So the 62500 and 31250 speeds were also tested with it. The source for this is in the lynx/contrib/mttty directory in my repo. Mttty.zip

I found the missing *.h files. Compiling the Atari 2600 versions produce a very much slower music. ntsc.mp3 Player_NTSC.a26 Player_PAL.a26 And the source... tiaplayer.zip The source music was created for 60Hz updates and the resulting binary appears to be 10s instead of 6s. So there is a considerable slowdown that is less than 50%. For my ears the tempo is not steady. By speeding up the playback you don't get the same. Perhaps the code puts in extra delays here and there?

This sounds like a really cool tool. I wonder if you can create a player that plays these percussions correctly. TIA_Percussion_Demo_01b.fur TIAdrums.mp3 I tried to compile it from your sources myself but there are a few include files missing in the repo. "vcs.h" "macro.h"

It uses similar commands as when interfacing with a cart. The blocksize is just 64 bytes and you use the block lines as with a cart. So my suggestion is to ditch the SRAM code and replace it with something else.

I assume that a single POKEY and Yamaha 2151 could be a pretty nice target as I have a Dragonfly with these chips. So at least I can compose tunes using Furnace Tracker and run them on the real hardware. But I need to modify my drivers to use these chips instead of sn7. My guess is that ProSystem emulator would emulate a Yamaha 2151 and a single POKEY on the new 2600+ machine too. So it would be up to 12 channels for the music. If the space is tight I assume that you could just use 6 channels and still get very good quality music. I just rendered a modified arcade tune in Furnace Tracker. Here it is played only on Yamaha 2151. But I assume that by adding some POKEY percussions it would be just great! arcadetest.mp3

Thank you for this info! I really like the idea about a dream chip in fpga. For Wizzy I already have a Furnace Tracker driver that makes a separate stream for every register. @Eagle did a demo like this. Then you runlength encode the streams and use huffman for compressing it. The driver then uses huffmunch for reading the next register value during te interrupt. The nice thing is that the driver and the music goes in the 16k RAM bank that is active during VBL. And the other 16k RAM bank is active during display for Maria tiles. This leaves the entire ROM free for the game! If someone is interested in my Furnace Tracker driver for the SN7 I can share it. It is still a mess but it works. I know that the latest SN2 cart may have the audio driver in the fpga as well. But then we start getting into the area where most of the processing is done in the cart and not in the console. I would like to maintain compability with flash carts and 2600+.

There is a nice way for printing good quality single copies of boxes. A local photo shop offers SRA3 size printouts in colour on 300g paper. (SRA3 = 320mm x 450mm) Single quantities are €10 and double sided €15. But if you are printing 20 pieces the price goes down to €1.50. This is a viable alternative for small homebrew releases. I have also been dreaming about a Cricut Maker 3 cutter that could cut and do the folding lines for the box. But the cutter is expensive so I just use a knife today. There is nice designs where you open up the box from the front and you use colour print on the inside of the box also. Yastune Games release their Lynx games in really beautiful and practical boxes.

Just homebrews for me. Plus testing all kind of bankswitching on my Otaku card. I am mainly playing the games nominated for this years awards.

Atari 2600 5200 7800 Game Box - PET Protectors - Pack of 25 – EVORETRO Canada These hard protectors are awesome! I have even been thinking about using the protector box with just an inset sheet to provide the back and the side graphics. Leaving the cart visible from the front. A little like Scary for the Lynx.

I have the EOTB with the 16k RAM for saves. So it works. Currently I also have a 64k eeprom. I don't see a big problem to change the read/write routines from the RAM to the 64k eeprom. It was pretty easy to find the code in EOTB. But... The gameplay is frustrating as the mazes in later stages are completely unpredictable. So I have not made the change - yet...

Perhaps. So far the Furnace Tracker Pokey demos are not convincing. The SN7 chips square wave instruments just sound better. But it may be that nobody has published good demo tunes for Pokey on Furnace Tracker yet. If the Hokey will emulate both square waves, noise and FM sounds for a decent price then that sounds like a good enough solution.

Thanks for the link. This chip is from 2011. I wonder if this is old stock? I tried to check Mouser, Digi-Key, Farnell plus some smaller chip vendors and I could not find any active FM chips. Even if there is some old stock available the cost may be high compared to an emulated solution.

Well. I have been trying different instruments on the Furnace Tracker that you can use for making chip music. Some of the chips produce really nice vibrant sound and some ones are pretty awful. So my point is: if you really have to emulate your sound chip anyway why not choose a nice chip? The best chip would be something that has a small number of registers. It should also be easy to control the envelope and the frequency of the sound. And the sound channels should be independent from each other. They should also maintain their pitch in both PAL and NTSC. The practical limitation is probably that HOKEY and Yamaha FM is emulated by the 2600+ ProSystem. So that may be the reason why we stay at HOKEY and Yamaha FM. Actually the best thing might be to use both chips in a game. Could these chips be easily emulated by some cheap microcontroller? Like my Pico in the Otaku project?

HOKEY is a fpga I believe. And Yamaha does not produce FM chips anymore afaik.

Amazon Germany works for all EU countries. No customs, same currency. I was able to get the 2600+ and paddles + games cheap from Amazon.de. But for some reason the 7800 joypads pre-order is limited to Germany only. Same thing for pre-order for paddles. Perhaps it is possible to order them later in May?

It appears that Yamaha and other instrument manufacturers create instruments with waveforms recorded from real analog instruments. So the current POKEY + Yamaha are at end of life. This probably means that in the future everybody is using some kind of digital synth for producing sound. I wonder what features would be needed? My personal feeling is that 3 square waves and noise would be the minimum. The goal could be to have a simple thing that could be emulated with a PWM timer or a few timers. Any ideas of a good chip?

I did have a look at the FE bankswitch. It is really weird. You need to make a JSR at the top level of the code. By monitoring the stack address (push return address to 01ff) you do a bank switch based on the contents of the 3 most significant data bus bits one clock cycle after the push to the stack. The same timing just happens to work on the rts command also. My guess is that you just flip the data bus to input and keep reading the pins until the address is no longer $01fe.