Vorticon

It may not be widely available in real hardware, but if it is under emulation then I think it will encourage some to support it from a software standpoint. It's a pretty powerful development environment with a full implementation of Pascal. My thinking is, if you build it, they will come All it will take to raise awareness of the P-Code system is a nice program such as a game. I am happy to loan you my P-Code card if it will help you debug the emulation issue.

Very cool! From a practical standpoint though, how do you plan on incorporating this inside the console? Or do you just plan on keeping the microcontroller board external?

Thanks I hope it lives up to its expectations. As for making it to the June deadline, that will likely be a stretch but one never knows BTW, where are you at with Realms of Antiquity?

Since I am planning on doing my next project in Pascal, I would love it if the P-Code in Classic 99 is fixed. Using the P-Code environment on the real machine is a pain in the butt at best, and slow, although pretty stable from my testing. Pleeeeaaaase ???

Here's a video of the player interface. I recorded it on my underpowered netbook, and so it is quite choppy and laggy, but it still should give you a fair idea of the game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8H5vamyPE

Tursi, are you going to make some kind of kit for the rest of us? Maybe a group buy?

Nice, but this would really be a completely new computer. I would love to have one, but a 4A it will never be... That said, put me down for one!

Easier said than done But I guess that's the fun of it...

OK. Here's the first official update to Ultimate Planet. This release only deals with the player's own units and basically demonstrates the player interface. There is no combat or AI at this time. I would appreciate it if a few here test it out and provide me with comments before I move on to the AI proper. I *think* I have worked out all the bugs, but one never knows. Unzip the files in DSK2 of Classic 99. To run, use EA option 3 and enter at the Filename Prompt DSK2.PLANET.OBJ then press enter. You will be prompted for another filename, so just press enter again. Under Program Name, enter START and press enter. You will be presented with a splash screen: just hit any key to dismiss. The gamefield consists of 4 bitmap screens organized in a large square. Your units occupy the left upper corner, and the enemy units the other 3 corners. You can scroll the field by 2 hexes using the CTRL + E,S,D,X keys, or jump to any of the 4 screens by using the FCTN + E,S,D,X keys. CTRL + H will take you to your home corner. You control the blue units. To select a unit, position the hex marker using the W,E,R,Z,X,C keys over the desired unit and press enter. The marker will turn red and the unit parameters will be displayed. If the unit is on top of terrain other than empty space, then the underlying terrain will be displayed next to the parameters for reference. Once a unit is selected, move the marker to the new location and press enter, at which point the unit will be displayed at its new location and the marker will turn cyan again. Each hex movement has a cost in terms of movement potential depending on the terrain. In this demo, I have grossly increased the movement potentials in order to allow you to roam around. Note that units cannot be stacked and cannot move over another unit. If you try to move a unit over an enemy unit, you will be asked whether you want to attack it or not. If you do, then you will commit the unit to combat and it will not be able to move until the next turn. While moving a unit, you can use the Fctn-9 key to go back to the previous hex and restore some of the movement potential. Cruisers can only move in empty space. Fighters can go through asteroid fields as well. Infantry can move in empty space or on the planetary surface. Armor can only move on planetary plains and production center (yellow markers on the planet). Cruisers (you have 3 of them) each carry 2 infantry and 2 armored units. The number available for each is displayed at the right of the cruiser parameters. You can deploy the infantry units either in empty space or on a planetary plain. Armored units can only be deployed on planetary plains. To deploy a unit, select (and move if needed) a cruiser and press the J key (jettison). You can then select which unit you want to deploy by pressing I or A (or press enter to cancel), at which point the marker will turn green. Move the marker to any valid hex within ONE HEX of the cruiser and press enter to deploy that unit. You can keep doing this until you run out of units. This should be pretty much it for now. One more thing: For more TI like looks, you will need to disable filtering under Classic 99. Please let me know what you think. planet.zip

Wonderful news!

Is Turbo Forth now available for distribution?

Mike, does this program produce sound lists for use on a TI?

Very nice! As far as time is concerned, you could try my method: I'm attempting to dedicate 1 hour a day for my TI programming projects... This usually tends to happen late in the evening, so an hour is probably all I can muster before having to retire so I can make it to work in the morning This also has the added advantage of keeping the program code fresh in your mind, which is a must for large projects. You see, once you reach the state where you have a truly global picture of program flow in your mind, your productivity really skyrockets because you don't have to keep relearning your code. Step away for a week or two and things start fading away, which makes it very difficult to come back. To give you an idea, I spent an entire weekend going over the code of Ultimate Planet after I had not touched it for several months before I could actually understand it enough to mess with it again. And even then, the new code I added has broken so many things that I've been slugging through bug after bug trying to get back to a functional state (nearly there!). Good luck! I'm really looking forward to playing your game

That's exactly what happens with me too, although I typically have it set as DSK4. I just can't trust it with source code... Please PM me about the Horizon RD details.

Eh, people tell me the speech is pretty subpar anyway, hehe! I'd never heard of Crossover Games before -- is that a free or commercial package? It would be good to offer people an alternative to Wine for Classic99. It's commercial unfortunately, although mine came bundled with Crossover Office Pro ($69). I would not recommend buying the standalone version though as it currently supports very few games, and most of what I tried outside of the sanctioned list did not work properly, especially graphically intensive ones. Some of the supported games were WOW, Starcraft 2, StarTrek online, Spore and Half Life. The PlayOnLinux software on the other hand is free and has a much larger list of supported games. I also use Oracle's Virtual Box which allows me to emulate a Win XP environment in a window. Between all of these utilities, I can pretty much run all of my current Windows software under Linux except for some of the games.

OK, it turned out that using END START instead of END somehow corrupts the GPLLNK utility. It took me a while to figure out why perfectly good code was misbehaving, until I remembered that I had a similar issue while coding the Chaos programs. I still don't have a clear explanation as to why this is the case, and I would love for someone here to enlighten me. Another bit of advice: never, and I mean NEVER, compile large amounts of untested code in a single shot. I just spent several hours trying to unravel the mess I created with my latest code additions, with things blowing up right and left, and finally ended up deleting all the new stuff and then reentering it bit by bit while testing along the way. I think my code is too complex for its own good, with some routines having as many as 4 levels of nesting, making debugging a nightmare. Some hobby

I think your mixing conversations (Mark and Marc) so for clarification (on my end anyway).... Sid player 300K+ of source (which I must admit that at least 50 percent is comments so lets say 150K of code that gets worked on.) EA5 object is about 22K. 14.3 Mhz crystal adds like you said about A 16 percent speed gain. Combined with 32k on the full width buss and no wait states you get a console that is better than twice as fast (Tursi will have to comment on my claim here as I am not sure "twice" is correct.) I have never had an issue with file access be it DSK. SCSI IDE or RAM disk at these speeds. RS232 and PIO access seem to also be unaffected despite other claims. Add in a RAM disk and file manipulation is now negligible especially with a faster console. Ram disk obviously accounts for the greatest speed difference. Using Funnelweb eliminates a bunch of typing which also adds in efficiency and eliminates finger errors. The figure was under 5 minutes not under a minute but that would be really nice. I have seen the Geneve do the assembly in MDOS mode in under 30 seconds which was really cool ! Don't get me wrong I am a live and let live guy. Real gear cool. Emulation cool. To each his own. Only responded because of the compare of the worst case of real gear to the best case of emulation in a previous post. Thanks for the clarification I'm with you on hardware, but unfortunately with my current set up things are pretty inefficient for large projects. I do have the 32K internal RAM kit I got from Richard Bell (not installed yet), and I can probably also do the fast crystal modification as it is well documented on the Mainbyte site. I also have a 512K Corcomp RAM disk, but it seems to have reliability issues with FW. When I have some extra time, I'll see if I can beef up my console. You got me real motivated here!

Ah! No! That's Marc - I'm Mark. Confusing isn't it! TurboForth is 8177 lines - checked this morning, and it's still (just) under 16K. Scary. Splitting your code into multiple files (this is just my opinion, of course) is easier than searching through the file, though if it works for you, then that's fine! Regarding assembling code on the TI, it is possible to massively reduce assembly time by using the TI Assembler the way it was meant to be used. When we assemble on the TI, we tend to assemble the whole assembly project, from start to finish. This is a real pain if your project is large and you only want to change a single MOV to a MOVB Of course, it doesn't have to be done that way at all - TI provided us with an assembler of unprecedented power when you compare it to the primitive assemblers available for the TI's peers of the day, which had *nothing* like what was available on the TI. The TI is a proper 'system' and is similar to it's TI Mini's in some ways. Anyway, I digress... ...if you split your code into multiple files, then, when you need to make a change, you only need to assemble the file in which you made your change. You don't need to assemble the others. References to addresses etc between files is automatically handled for you by the assembler; you just need to REF them. Years ago, when I wrote The Game Writers Toolkit, I originally wrote the code in a notebook and typed it into the line-by-line assembler in MiniMem! Later, when I got a disk system, I put each CALL LINK word into it's own source file. Then, if I need to change one word, I just assemble one file. If you want to re-assemble the entire project, you can have a 'top-level' assembly file, which just consists of COPY directives. You probably know this already, just repeating this stuff for the die-hards Mark Sorry about the confusion here I was just about to take a plane and fly to OK to verify in person Marc's compilation claims! I do use a master file with COPY directives, primarily because the TI editors cannot handle large source files. I honestly never tried to compile sections of the source, and I would appreciate it if you could elaborate on this a bit more. I understand REFing the utilities, but what about jumps and branches between different source files?

I'm only still at 2074 lines, although I do expect to almost double that by the time the project is done. As to editing large files, one can hop around easily using the search function as long as you sections are labeled properly. It's faster than loading separate files, although there is definitely a chance of losing your entire work in one shot if your file become corrupted for some reason. I guess that's what backup is for Don't misunderstand me, I am a die hard real hardware fan, but I have to agree with Matt that this should not preclude the use of modern tools when necessary. 8100+ lines!!! Is this the code for the SID card or is it some mystery project I have no knowledge of? You must be getting real close to your memory limits here, and I still have a hard time believing you can compile this is under a minute

The faster crystal is supposed to give you at most a 20% increase in speed. I suppose when combined with the RAM disk, then it could account for your performance gains... Still, I like the fact that I can have my entire source code all in a single file instead of having to break it into smaller sections which is very cumbersome when it comes to editing and hunting down bugs. Who knows, if ASM99a keeps popping up with bugs then I may have to revert back to the old ways

I think I found another issue with ASM99a: The following sequence (to generate an error tone) corrupts the screen... CLR R1 MOVB R1,@GPLSTS GPLSTS DEFINED AS >837C BLWP @GPLLNK DATA >0036 This is likely related to GPLLNK, unless I'm missing something.

Hey Adam, if I finish Ultimate Planet by July 1st, I will post it as an entry. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you though As tempting as this contest sounds, I just don't want to get distracted from finishing U P by Faire time.

Quick update: Winasm99 and TI99Dir work just fine within Linux. Combined with Classic 99, I now have a complete development package running under Ubuntu 10.10

Nice. Apart from software reasons ... I've had my own, family and friends PCs go slow. I noticed a symptom of the fans starting to kick in earlier. I monitored temperatures, did a good clean, and performance was sometimes much better afterwards. Also I've made some graphic cards perform better adding extra, but cheap cooling. I'm not an expect at either, so go Google it, if you have further questions. Believe me I Google the heck out of the issue, and while a few out there had similar issues, no one had a specific answer, although clearly drivers were at fault here. My PC is a Dell, so it is conceivable that they had some proprietary driver installed that is no longer available. Regardless, the issue is now moot Going forward, I will be building my own PC's like I used to a decade ago, that way I'll have total control over the components and it will likely be cheaper!

Well, I finally ditched Windows XP on my main PC yesterday. It had slowed to a crawl after I reinstalled Windows, and no amount of driver updates could revive it, including updating the BIOS. It was 5 years old, and in PC terms this was an eternity. So I was faced with either buying a new PC (about $1300), try installing Win 7 ($200), or install Ubuntu from a Linux magazine ($14.99). So I chose the latter, as I could always revert to the 2 other options if it did not work out. It worked out great as now my PC is back to its old speed, at least for a P4. How is this relevant to this topic you say? Well, I was able to run Classic 99 under Ubuntu using Codeweavers' Crossover Games, and it worked really well except that speech was a little subpar. Pretty nifty! The execution speed is similar to Windows as far as I can tell. On a side note, between Crossover Office, Crossover Games, and Dosbox Linux, and was able to use most of my old Dos/Win software with no compromise, while gaining the flexibility, speed and slickness of Linux. The latter has really come a loooong way from a decade ago as far as ease of installation and use. My first Linux experience was with Slackware Linux in the 1990's, and at the time installation was a very labor intensive proposition, not to mention X Window configuration, and you truly still needed a Dos/Win machine for real work or fun. Next on my list is TIDIr and Asm99a