SpiceWare
-
Content Count
16,912 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
10
Blog Comments posted by SpiceWare
-
-
That didn't take long!
A not-so-hot photo of the car's been added. If I receive a better photo I'll post it.
-
LOL. Thanks!
Been busy with RL of late, was out of town last weekend and will have a house full of company this weekend. I hope to resume my blog updates next week.
-
I'd noticed it was Time Pilot, but totally overlooked the significance. -
Revised the Display Data section.
-
Found a few more links for the Further Reading section.
-
That makes sense.
I do like the ZP hotspots better, like Tigervision's 3F, as they don't waste any of the ROM. Additionally, each trigger of a bankswitch uses 1 byte less ROM and 1 less cycle of CPU time.
supercat's X07 bankswitch format, used for Stella's Stocking, has a slick feature that lets you do a bankswitch without wasting any cycles, but the feature only works in the last 2 banks. He needed that ability in order to bankswitch during the kernel for his music playing menu. He posted a little bit about it here.
-
Is there any public documentation on the internals of the Harmony cart?
Latest entry in this series has info on the internals.
-
Added ARM and Further Reading sections.
-
We often played on a 12" B&W set. Sometimes we left the VCS set for color because it looked better.
-
1
-
-
-
Hmm, shouldn't the second switch on the left be in the down position?
-
I noticed I used the wrong screenshot for new name, reinitialize, it didn't show reinitialize as checked. That's been corrected.
-
I don't have a usage cap, but the content aspect is part of why I'm not planning to get one yet. I was an early adopter for HDTV back in 2001, only because my prior TV had died and I couldn't see replacing it with an SDTV, but I at least had 9 HD channels via cable.
I don't believe my mini could drive a 4K display either, so that would also have to be replaced. The current mini can handle it, but it appears to be only at 30 Hz - yuck. I suspect by the time I replace the TV and mini that the DVR Project savings will cover the cost.
-
That it is, though I turned out to be wrong in my assumption on the source of the jitter. That'll be found and fixed in Part 13
-
If you're running Linux, you might like to install the Linux version of VirtualBox anyway. There's a few versions of the C compiler and each one optimizes the code different, which can result in the compiled ARM code being smaller when using one version vs another. Having a different version installed in each VM makes it easier to quickly compare the results.
As an example, these games used these versions of the compiler:
- Stay Frosty 2 - 2011.03-42
- Space Rocks - 2012.09-63
-
Your welcome!
Was going to post part 2 today, but woke up under the weather. Cancelled brunch plans with my folks and went back to bed. Just got up a little bit ago and though I'd catch up on things while I felt a little better.
Feeling rough again now though, so I'm off to veg out on the couch and watch some TV. Maybe I'll put a dent in the 1400+ shows my Mac mini DVR has recorded for me
-
My first computer was going to be a CoCo; however, a Radio Shack employee lied to me (and my grandma) so I got a VIC 20 instead.
-
When I started work on Stay Frosty 2, I was using an ARM compiler than ran under OS X. I switched to a different compiler because it generated significantly smaller code. I think it was 8-9% smaller, will post specifics in Part 12 of The Story of Stay Frosty 2.
The new compiler wasn't available for OS X. I already had a Linux VM running under Parallels* so it wasn't any extra work for me to use the compiler under Linux.I'm not aware of any public documentation on the internals, but I'll be putting that information out as part of this series.
* Looks like I've been using Parallels since June 2006. VirtualBox was released in 2007.
-
-
Using ARM and C code were new so we had a major learning curve going.
And, of course, every-time we freed up a chunk of ROM we just expanded the scope of the game - so it was a never ending battle.
-
I don't know if it was, I do know speech can be done without it. It requires the AUDV0 register to be updated on every single scanline, same thing is done to generate 3 voice music in Pitfall 2 with the aid of its DPC chip. It can be done without hardware assist, as shown by Quadrun and Open Sesame back in the day or the hack Berzerk VE.
If you check the Frantic blog entries you'll find some that play back speech starting with the May 30, 2011 post.
-
The X register must be preloaded with $FF for this to work.
- 6507 requests a byte value for a specific address from the 4K cartridge address space
- the ARM chip, in charge of returning values from that 4K, uses the current bank and specified address to look up which byte value it needs to give the 6507
- The ARM puts that byte value on the data bus
- If the BUS_STUFFING mode is OFF, that's all the ARM does. However, if BUS_STUFFING is ON and the value was $86 (the byte value of a STX ZeroPage command) it has the following additional steps to take:
- When the 6507 requests the next byte value, the ARM retrieves it and puts it on the data bus
- The ARM checks to see if that byte value is one of the TIA registers that we're doing bus stuffing on
- if not, the ARM is done. If it's a TIA register, it has more work to do:
- The ARM figures out which datastream is associates with the TIA register
- The ARM retrieves the next value from that datastream
- At the same time the 6507 puts the value of the X register on the data bus, the ARM puts the datastream value on the databus
- Because of how the electronics work, the X register value of $FF from the 6507 gets Boolean Anded with the datastream value from the ARM. The ANDED value is stored in the TIA register.
-
That there are. If SF3 happens, it won't be for the 2015 Holiday Cart.
When I get back to work on 2600 code it'll be to hash out a bus-stuffing bankswitch format with batari and gang. After that I'll reboot Draconian to use it. If it works as expected, the bus stuffing version of the Slick Kernel will add HMOVE shifting to all objects (currently only works for player objects) plus the ability to color and resize the ball object. The HMOVE change will allow the diagonal ship shots to actually be diagonal, plus the ability to rotate the station shots as seen in the arcade game. The ball changes will allow that object to be used to draw shots, for less flicker on something critical for the player to see, while still being used to draw the parallax starfield.I also plan to reboot Frantic to use it, the asymmetrical playfield will add additional wrinkles to bus-stuffing. We have a couple ideas on how to handle that:
- use STX PFx for the left side, STX PFx + $40 (TIA mirror address) for the right side
- support alternating datastreams - the first STX PFx uses one datastream while the second STX PFx uses another.
Should be a fun project!
-
I was kind of bummed out that a version could not be made for the TI-99/4A.
Why couldn't it be made? I thought the TI-99/4A used the same video chip as the ColecoVision, which has a version of Omega Race.
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Houston Art Car Parade 2015
in SpiceWare's Blog
A blog by SpiceWare
Posted
He might be planning that.
I've not seen the track in person yet - he built it last night and they live 200+ miles south of me.