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sack-c0s

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Posts posted by sack-c0s

  3. Posted

    18 hours ago, Faicuai said:

     

     

    Well, if I read correctly, it is essentially a joke, that's why you missed it:

     

    "The geoRAM is a banked system. The registers at $dfff and $dffe select which 256 bytes page is visible in the $de00-$deff range. The $dfff register selects a 16KB block out of the total memory, the register at $dffe selects the actual 256 bytes page within the selected block. Valid values for a standard geoRAM are 0-31 for the block register and 0-63 for the window register. It is possible to extend the block register to 8-bit to create a 4MB "

     

    Reminds me a bit of 800's $C000-$CFFF older banked ram expansions, but 4 Kbytes at a time. 

     

    Unless you can actually bank in/out larger ram-blocks from the system bus, it seems it would take a brave soul to develop a complex app. like The Last Word, 256-bytes at a time... Unless, of course, we also beed another Banked-RAM literacy crusade from C64 Templar Knights... 😂

     

    That would explain why people aren't talking about it - i appreciate the feature being there for compatibility but the original feature itself does feel a bit useless. To be fair banking out 256 bytes could be useful if you did it on pages 0 and 1 because it would help with task switching...

  4. Posted · Edited by sack-c0s
    quoted wrong post like some kind of an idiot...

    19 hours ago, Faicuai said:

    Of course it is (a storage processor / server, as described before), even running its own "DOS" command set and a lengthy host of other features (!) 

     

    There is essentially nothing wrong with that. The point here is what it really is, and at the end it does not matter who like such definition or not.

     

    I would like to see the actual results of a timed or looped RANDOM-sector read directed from the host, via DMA transfers and without them, via DOS or OS. Based on that, we could also look at a simple DOS backup from of a folder located in floppy-image onto fixed storage (HD), including files and folder re-creation and attributes management (a pretty mundane, routine operation on my end, for instance).

     

    That would be really nice to see. 😎

     

     

     

    I think that it would match the timings of an ideal 1541 for compatibility purposes (although after 30 years of use i don't think a real one would meet 'ideal' any more)

  6. Posted

    The 1541 Ultimate isn't a 'surrogate processor'. It emulates a disk drive and a tape recorder, which is accessed in the same way that the real devices would be in a cycle-exact simulation, which means that they are compatible with turbo loaders.
    As for the extra memory - that acts like a Ram Expansion Unit (REU) that was produced during the commercial life of the machine, only expanded to 16MB in the same way that other clones were. Honestly it's more like a RAM disk than a memory expansion, so not even as flexible as an Atari memory expansion. You need to copy in and out of the expansion RAM through a port and it stops the CPU whilst this is happening. You do get the advantage of a 1 byte per cycle transfer (which is impossible using a 6502 loop) but the downside is that it has to be a linear transfer so it's not easily abusable as a blitter. You can stop destination address incrementing however so it will hammer a single address with a sequence of bytes once per cpu cycle.

    It adds nothing to the CPU power of the machine. That remains the same as ever.

    The one awesome thing it does do that wasn't generally possible back in the day (unless you were a studio with an expensive PDS setup)is allow you to inject and run code into RAM over ethernet for cross-compiling and hardware testing, and if somebody ever points me towards an Atari 8-bit device that does the same thing you can be damn sure I'm having one of those!

    • Like 3

  14. Posted

    On 8/15/2020 at 8:45 PM, emkay said:

    It's not the first time ;) 

     

    Actually this tune is musically sack-c0s high quality.  It's only one of the patterns is playing too loud in relation to the rest of the tune. 

    I also miss the whirly slides inbetween. The original tune has a lot FX included.  

     

     

    Don't know why I didn't notice it before, but now I see which part you mean. I just lowered the volume on that part and it does sound better as a result.

    The slides and effects are taking a bit of experimentation so I'm still working on those

  15. Posted

    On 8/22/2020 at 10:55 PM, emkay said:

    Hm... I wonder what is going on with sack-c0s. 

    He's posting the video after long time not writing here, and disappeared the same way. 

     

    Everything ok?

     

    Everything is fine. The short version is:

     

    *Just released a game in my dayjob, and everything was crazy busy getting things working, and then along come a few thousand players who find new ways to break stuff, so more work to fix things.
    *I Posted this as a bit of a break, literally just before leaving for the airport because I had some free time.

    *Then I went on a long overdue holiday (Which wasn't cancelled this time), which is where I am now.

     

    Also trying to buy a house, so that's also chaos. Once things calm down some more normal service will be resumed :)

    • Like 3

  16. Posted

    It's been a while (it turns out releasing a game for modern platforms is actually hard work), but I finally have time to catch my breath, go on holiday, and go back to playing with 8/16-bit stuff.

    The bassline may or may not be accurate for C64 fans - that depends on if you listened to the original on a 6581 or 8580. It's closer to the way it sounds on my 8580 and personally I prefer it that way, but YMMV.

     

     

    • Like 18
    • Thanks 1

  17. Posted

    I actually used to be an Acorn Archimedes coder. After that I went back to the C64 (before branching out to just about anything that would let me run code on it).

     

    That thing had a nice, fast, simple CPU, linear chunky screen memory, 256 colours, it slaughtered the Amiga in terms of 3D power, and could give it something to think about in terms of 2D too.

    So... why would I code an Amiga game instead?

     

    *because the people who would download and try the game aren't a pain in the arse about it*. Endless amounts of crap about 'not showing the power of the machine enough', 'not being an Amiga beater', 'Just not being the game I'd have written so you shouldn't have either'. It was a complete and total buzzkill on a machine I actually liked. It just seemed completely and totally pointless. I'm seeing some of that here too.

     

    It's not technical, it's not a question of cycle counts, register usage or anything like that. Sometimes it's just that people just make it outright unsatisfying to code for some platforms. If you want an honest answer about why people may choose 'the weaker platform' then I'm afraid that's it.

    Compared to some 8-bit machines writing a Sinclair Spectrum game would be like walking both ways uphill in winter whilst carrying a rock on your back, but given that there would be a certain amount of *appreciation* for having made the effort...

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 1

  18. Posted · Edited by sack-c0s

    I would bitch and moan about type-ins, but here's me personal relationship with the damn things:

     

    1) tried typing them in

    2) They didn't work.

    3) saw correction 1-2 months later, but that was an age as a kid

    4) gave up, and figured out enough to just write what the description said the game did, using the screenshot as guidance

    5) Ended up on the less popular platforms for a while (Acorn Archimedes anyone?), so more of the same....

    6) ended up porting games for a living

     

    so I pretty much built a career out of typos in type-ins I suppose

    • Like 5

  19. Posted · Edited by sack-c0s

    The C64 doesn't have a monitor, but if you have a cartridge (such as the Action Replay) then you have a monitor and freezer available.

    don't get me wrong - I love my C64 - but once you try an Action Replay it doesn't feel like a full machine when it's disconnected. If you have actual hardware then I really recommend getting one

  20. Posted

    About the C128. I'd bet, a native Z80 program using the hardware right, could blast 80% of all 8-Bits away.

     

    The z80 is clocked slow (2mhz i think) on the 128 to get it to work with the system bus - People seem to be of the opinion that the 6502 would just outperform it.

     

    I think the 16-bit registers and the stack handling is better on Z80, so it is sometimes nicer to code for, but for me it's the custom chips that make the machine - and that almost always leads back to the 6502.

    That said - there's always the Sega Mastersystem....

    • Like 1

  22. Posted

    You only talked about doing 60FPS video originally, no other implications were stated...

     

     

    The same is true for the C64, the cartridge does the donkey work of chunking data around at speed so the standard I/O isn't in use after starting up (the boot program could be loaded from tape if needed, it'd be tiny and a good fastloader'll get that done in no time) and in both cases it doesn't work if you take the extra hardware in the cartridge away. The Atari player seems to be doing (assuming a cursory, headache-impaired search found the right variant) is presenting the ANTIC with data for it's DMA directly from the cartridge where the C64 code I was talking about just "loads" data into the RAM where the VIC-II is looking for it.

     

    Doing sampled audio at the same time is more tricky since that data transfer is intrusive on the C64 - the DMA halts the 6510 whilst working whilst the VIC-II "multitasks" and carries on regardless - so restarting the processor every X cycles to play a nybble of sample the "traditional" way is probably not viable with 60FPS playback. From what the devs say about the sample driver in Fantasmolytic (fast forward to 6:22) it'd be at least potentially doable that way I think...?

     

     

    If "stock" includes a whacking great IDE interface plugged into the cartridge port, then you're working with a very odd definition of the term there... but s'okay because a whacking great RAM expansion plugged into the C64 cartridge port counts as "stock" under that definition too. =-)

     

    I noticed the other day that you can kick the 6510 off the bus from the cartridge port so there's an interesting potential to just turn it into a zombie shell of a C64 with the custom chips driven by whatever you want on the cartridge. Sort of like a SNES SuperFX cartridge on steroids.

     

    Part of me wants to wire up a FPGA board to a connector to try that out....

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