manopac

would it be easy to add "Reset" as an option for Cold boot ? to make the Cold boot the default whenever you press reset ? or would that break something else ?

and it does 🙂 cool !! thanks a lot - with the loader set to boot immediatly, I only have to press Select+Reset to get back to the loader 🙂 thanks a lot !! and looking forward to the next release of the firmware

hm - doesnt work for me - it just does a "soft" reset (i.e. back to the game if its staying in memory) - I have to do Reset+Help / then press L - the only way to get back to the loader without turning it off/on again (trying on an 800XL with U1MB, Side2 - maybe I have to change a setting in U1MB ? flashed with your 4.2 firmware already btw) and thanks for the quick reply 🙂

I was wondering - did you ever get around to release it? just got my U1MB and Side2 and about to flash it 🙂 also - I can think of a feature that would be nice to have but not sure it is possible to implement it technically (or if its already implemented and I am just too stupid to find it?): Turn Reset-Key into Cold-Reset, so that everytime I press reset I get back into the Side2 Loader Menu - it feels like this would make switching between games much quicker 🙂

Will it be available later if one cant make it to the Abbuc meeting?

no, there are lots of voice games, e.g. Terrahawks, Stone Sling

not to my knowledge - I remember annotating the G7400 OS specific parts in the OS Rom, but never the two Roms for the C7420 ...

they are not 🙂 thats why you cant find them in ram ... seteg is actually a command in the G7400 Basic (16KB, written in Z80 code) that instructs the cart stuck into the G7400 (2 KB, written in 8048h code) to redefine a character on the EF9340+EF9341 chips (special chips in the G7400 not present in the G7000, that were also used in various teletext systems) - so no simple poke to set the characters 🙂 you could disassemble the C7420 Rom Source to see what exactly seteg is doing and it might be possible to write a machine language program in Z80 code you could poke into memory and run - but I doubt it would give you a speed advantage over seteg ... also - not really worth scanning the memory from -32767 to 32767 - the C7420 has only 16KB of ram 🙂

One for me please 🙂

I implemented this debugger command specifically for the purpose of saving the grid after using my grideditor (which can be found along with the other tools I wrote here btw (then you also see what keys are supported in gridedit)): http://www.guttenbrunner.com/videopac/

ok - lets not call it a flaw but a disadvantage

thats pretty much what C7010 (Chess) and C7420 (Basic) are doing ... using the Videopac/O2 system just for displaying on the screen whatever the Z80 processor in the attachment comes up with ...

Its nothing that can be done in Software only - again: Software only allows a max 12 KByte, for everything else hardware bankswitching is needed that can have different forms, ones of which is the one Soeren implemented in his MegaCART, others are what Videopac 31, 40, 55, 58, 59, 60 doing ... so if you REALLY want to get around the 12 KB Limit, you can - I wouldnt advise it though, as you would have to copy an existing bankswitching scheme (to use it in an emulator where it is supported), build your hardware to try it out properly and also find someone willing to manufacture carts from it then ...

Well - they just didn't think far enough from the initial point it made sense - the O2 had much better capabilities than the Atari 2600 in terms of elements it could display at once - games like Munchkin made Pac Man on the A2600 look really bad ... compared to the first Atari 2600 games, the O2 games just looked and played better ... but the Atari 2600 programmers soon found ways to get past the few "player/missiles" and other elements that was the "base set" of what the A2600 could do - so games on the A2600 got better really quickly (especially when Activision entered the scene ...), while O2 games stayed what they were (with few exceptions like Killer Bees) - and the fixed character set in the end also didnt really help the system as games started to look "the same" (with the guy walking always being taken from the characters and thus always being the same character in most games ...) (just IMHO)

so - this is not true 🙂 without any extra hardware the total an O2 game would be able to access is 12 KByte (4 banks, 3Kbyte per bank, 1Kbyte is "reserved" by the ROM which is hardwired into the Cartridge space), but even some original games for the Videopac+ use 16K using extra hardware for bankswitching on the cart (59+, 60+) - and one concept for doing this is what Soeren Gust was designing with the "MegaCART" long ago (so long ago that the webpage is not available anymore other than in the internet archive ...): http://web.archive.org/web/20130613131556/http://soeren.informationstheater.de/g7000/megacart.html with this you would be able to get 1 MByte for the Odyssey2 (not using a Voice, thats the only restriction ...) The bad apple demo would not work for another reason - the O2 does not support a "Bitmap" in the classical sense ... thus not allowing you to show an "image" built of of "pixels" ... (the Atari 2600 doesn't have that either, but here comes a design flaw of the O2 - the processor and the video beam are not in sync ... so the so called "racing the beam" that allows you to exactly switch colors always on the same position at the screen at the Atari 2600 is not possible on the O2 ... thus limiting programmers to basically what the hardware was intended to do without being able to do proper "tricks" ...) So in theory to do the bad apple demo on the O2 you would need to build up each frame using just the standard elements that the system provides: - built in characters (or parts of them) (12 single characters, 4 "blocks" of 4 characters) (from the top of my head, not 100% sure the numbers are correct) - sprites (4) - the grid - background color if you manage to build up each frame from those elements (maybe with switching some elements at the end of the raster line) then it could be possible ... but the effort is enourmous ... and yes, you would need the "MegaCART" for it, as the code will look different for every frame of the demo, depending on how many frames you need and how complex each frame is, lots of code is needed for that ... it might be possible to do on the Videopac+ (the never released Odyssey 3 in the US), as you can define bitmaps there (see background images for Videopac+ games) - not sure you can do it fast enough to show a different image every frame though - but worth a try 🙂