RevEng
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Blog Comments posted by RevEng
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Looking forward to your release, and SpiceC also - similar but different niches there too. The 2600 is getting an embarrassment of developer riches. 👍
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On 4/24/2020 at 3:27 PM, splendidnut said:You may ask: So why not BatariBasic (Bb)? Well, while Bb provides a nice way for coders and non-coders alike to develop games for the Atari 2600... It relies on canned kernels... and it seems to be a little bit of a pain to include/use your own assembly display kernels. Granted this is all from what I gathered from reading thru posts, especially @Karl G's posts in which he does a great service to the Bb community by using his skills to help others in this aspect.
It's not a pain to add kernels to bB. The language is very modular, but you need to know how to write a kernel, and you need to know how to write assembly code, since any higher level language will obscure cycle timing and page crossing penalties.
Since many people are drawn to bB because they want to program 2600 games without learning assembly or machine internals, they're not wanting to learn all that to write games in bB. Instead they rely on the kindness of others.
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The engine is looking really good, and I like how you've broken up the tasks by frame. I'm not as disciplined, and tend to do frame task-balancing only when I've started to hit issues.
There's a trick I do on the 7800 for gauging the relative weight of routines for balancing - since most game code is running during the visible screen, you can change the background color at the start and end of routines, which shows how many "lines" of CPU time you've used. It's a shame there's not something similar to be done on the 2600. You could do it in principal I guess, if emulators showed all of the overscan and vblank lines, and you disabled blanking.
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HP uses FreeDOS for their bootable BIOS update disks, so the hardware has already been tested with it. The option is basically free for them, even if nobody takes them up on it.
As to why... Some people prefer the non-emulated approach. Others may need to run legacy software with peripherals or dongles that don't work with VMs.
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On paper specs can be deceiving. It's more a case of "technically different", rather than "technically superior". In summary, the 7800 is "better" at producing large numbers of sprites than the NES, with a more generous sprite definition as well (maximum sprite width=32 bytes on the 7800, rather than 8 pixels on the NES) . The NES is "better" at tile based manipulation, and also doesn't lose anywhere near as much CPU time to screen preparation and rendering as the 7800 does.
At higher resolutions MARIA, the 7800 DMA chip, gets bogged down by churning through the background tiles, which eats quite a bit into how many sprites it can actually render in any given horizontal zone. It's one reason why the 160 pixel resolution mode is often preferred.
The screen prep CPU time can be mitigated a fair bit by double-buffering on the 7800, but it's rarely done because it generally requires cart-based RAM. Here's a double-buffer demo that moves 40 non-flickering sprites around the screen.
Anyway, rarely is one console of a similar generation "technically superior". Many may consider the Intellivision and Colecovision superior to the 2600, but as you know, the beam-racing architecture of the 2600 and more-or-less enforced 60Hz game speed allow it to be superior to both in certain narrowly defined ways.
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Stay safe, Darrell. Fingers crossed that the water doesn't get higher in your neighbourhood.
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I have no problem with he becoming a she, but I just hope it doesn't become a running gag. I expect there will be some shtick about the body change, similar to when Matt Smith's Doctor completed regeneration, but after that it should be business as usual. (as much as it would with a male regeneration)
TBH I would have preferred to see Capaldi stay on and us get a new spin-off about a female time lord (River Song?) but that's because I like the feel of an older Doctor, and Peter's acting specifically. I enjoyed Matt Smith's run, but the romantic angles became grating after a while, and that becomes less tempting for the writers when the Doc is an old man or lady.
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My condolences, RT. Hoping for comfort for you and your family.
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I'm hoping for dignity and comfort for your mom, RT, and strength for you and your family.
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Sorry for the bad news, RT.
While it's an understatement to say this is terrible news, it's slightly less terrible that you still have time together. Stay strong.
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Interesting find. Thanks for sharing!
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Looks like a great start. Can't wait to see what you come up with!
You may want to consider a 160B sprite with 12 colors, if you feel you can use all that palette. It's actually a fair bit less CPU intensive, and it uses the same ROM if you actually are using 2x 160A sprites for each frame.
I love the "to heck with planning" approach. See how the game wants you to design it.
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Thanks for the great write-up, Nathan. I have similar fond memories of Radio Shack, Forrest Mims books, free battery of the month club cards, and friends with TRS-80 computers.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I think to remain profitable, Radio Shack would have had to embrace online a lot earlier, and more sincerely. Companies like SparkFun and Adafruit are filling a online niche that Radio Shack owned in their bricks and mortar.
Instead they ignored their roots and doubled-down again and again on cell phone sales.
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Hang in there, Bob.
To wax philosophical... time is a dimension that spreads out infinitely like any other, but because of our limited nature we can only see one point on that line - the now. In a very concrete way, past, present, and the future all exist as part of a static picture, containing all of us that have gone, those that are here, and those that will come.
That thought always gives me a bit of comfort when I contemplate how short life seems. Hoping it does the same for you.
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I'm so very sorry to hear about your loss, Bob. It sounds like the two of you had a very special friendship.
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You're welcome!
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Nicely done! I'm looking forward to more updates.
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Thanks guys!
Glad you enjoyed the write-up, Trebor. I always enjoy it when other devs (like SpiceWare!) give behind-the-scenes info, so I'll try to write up any other interesting bits I run into.
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Thanks Bob!
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Thanks guys!
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The lines in any 96 pixel display at sprite boundaries are due to the fact that chroma/luma aren't perfect square waves, taking differing amounts of time to ramp up and down, and doing so in an analog fashion.
Some people lessen the lines by forgoing flickerblinds and doing a solid 6 sprites in a row on the left in even frames, and another solid 6 sprites in a row on the right in odd frames. That just leaves just a single darker line down the middle.
The bB titlescreen 96-wide minikernel uses flickerblinds and does the same. Personally I agree with the others that it's no big deal.
(and beautiful title!)
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Maybe you could tackle the problem at another level... if you interfaced to the internal PS2 pins, you could convert that to USB HID keyboard protocol.
It looks like there are a few implementations, including one built around an origial teensy.
[edit] Nevermind. I see you discounted Blue Cube adapters, which is this sort of thing. Just looked it up.
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Well, with a cheaper tiny you could just use perfboard and not much more than the shift registers and a decoupling cap.
But for sure the teensy++ is the easier route, given the near pin out match.
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7800 - Why didn't this already exist?
in -^CroSBow^-'s Hardware Videos
A blog by -^CrossBow^-
Posted
If this involves impossible joystick directions, beware that certain non-joystick controllers - trakballs, mice, etc - can trigger them.