sack-c0s

well here's my attempt

looking at the back of my Gameboy colour it's CGB-001 (presumably CGB = Colour GameBoy)

Yep 32K for single chip SMS carts. And because the SMS1 uses a bios and sms2 uses a Prg rom you "could" install a custom bios like in the 7800 dev system and use a ram cart btw, your confusing mappers with bankswitching. I still don't fully understand either, I just know it's not the same thing. btw2, does DASM compile Z80 code ? Well my understanding of mappers from the GBC was that you wrote a number to a rom Address and another bir of memory appears ni the map at a given address so I assumed they're different terms for the same thing. The BIOS on the mastersystem banks itself out once it hands control over to the cartridge though, so I don't think there's much (if anything) you can do with a hacked BIOS. all the interrupt entry points are then in the cartridges memory space so it's not like anything can be intercepted either. I'm ready to be corrected on both points though I don't know about DASM for z80 though - I'm using TASM myself

in terms of homebrew distribution I think the Sega mastersystem would probably be easier to work with if games are kept to below 64k (or is it 32? i forget...) that way no bankswitching chips are needed and the only security involves sticking an 8-byte ID at the right address and checksumming the cart. the upside is the hardware seems easier to manipulate than the NES but the downside is you'd need to learn Z80 (and i get the impression I'm around 6502 fans here. personally I prefer z80 but the best machines are all '02 based so what can you do? )

Amen to that! commodore basic V2 only has 3 redeeming commands- PEEK, POKE and SYS. Not even a screen colour command - what the bejeezus were commodore thinking? suppose it made the leap to assembler a lot easier seeing as the basic couldn't do much more than 6502 itself

'One sunday, after tea and compulsory prayers....' *ahem* sorry. anyhow - Deus Ex-machina was pretty much tied to what was happening on the audio casette and required you to syncronise the casette to the computer. this made for either a very linear game or a soundtrack which was completely irrelevant depending on how you look at it. you could have some kind of ambient atmospheric music on the tape though - the music in the (admittedly very few) text adventures I've played when computer generated never seemed to be linked to what was going on in the game anyhow. On the plus side though - has anyone else ever gotten royally stoned and just sat there listening to the tape accompanying Deus Ex Machina? Jesus..... [Edit: speaking of which - I forgot I had that bizarre Frankie Howerd quote from DeM as my sig...]

cheers I've nailed the virus on one machine and found a seemingly undocumented variant on another. Edit: It's not undocumented it's just AVG who don't know about it. those pricks are just so far out of the fucking loop on the virus front it's unreal!

Gah - spent the last 5 hours updating windows, fixing crap and installing patches to get rid of that bloody blaster worm and did this to amuse myself whilst I was waiting. for whatever it's worth, here ya go freedom.zip

I've monkied around with the C16/plus4, C64, Gameboy Colour, acorn archimedes and Gamepark GP32. the atari is my current target though...

*phew*....

Hummm... any guesses? jmp i_feel_pretty J/K -Bry There are some question in life best not asked... and having done so myself I can confirm that this is indeed one of them

Yes but the sound hardware was an utter *bastard* (thank christ for people like Quantum for coding modules for tracker playback:) ) and everything up to the VIDC20 (i think) in the RISC PC had a fixed 256 colour palette which is (a) awful and (b) by it's fixed nature makes some things damn awkward. Take screen fading: on the ST: Just reprogram the palette every frame with darker colours until you hit black. that's what? 256/512/768 bytes per frame? I was an archie coder too, so forgive me for not knowing On the Archimedes: Get a pixel, look up to find what the next value should be to replace it with, write it to the shadow scren bank. 320*256 bytes later, wait for VSync, flip the screens. Conclusion: Mindbogglingly slow compared to the ST. Never underestimate how much even a small hardware feature can boost/cripple the CPU but it is nice being able to do: ADR R0,sprite LDR R1,screenbase LDR R2,spriteX LDR R3,spriteY ADD R3,R3,R3,ASL #2 ; Quick MUL by 320 ADD R3,R2,R3,ASL #6 ; (If i'm not too drunk to mess this up) ADD R1,R1,R3 #rept 32 LDMIA R0!,{R2-R9} STMIA R1,{R2-R9} ADD R1,R1,#320 #endr for a damn simple 32x32 sprite plotter (not to self: don't ever post drunk again - writing the same post 3 times in an effort to get it right is tiresome:) )

you could do it in the VBL - but I personally wouldn't. I'd do it in a DLI during a bit of the screen where you don't need the CPU to tweak any display stuff (like a static bitmap the size of the widest the aforementioned timing bar gets), saving the VBL time for modifying any graphics bits that need doing. ...but then again what I currently know about Atari 8-bit code you can write on the back of a postage stamp with a JCB, so your milage may vary....

Hey, don't be dissin' The Empire Strikes Back. No, he be dissin' the C64 version of AMC, which does show it's age 'cos Minter coded it without any real hardware reference. One of these days, i'll port the Atari version to the C64... =-) By this way you can create an AOTMC version on the XL that uses it's hardware in a higher level.... Or should I say in other words, that AOTMC for me looks like crap with DLIs Can we please stop this arguement and turn our minds to more important issues... like porting Ancipital to the Atari instead?

One little beep and then silence. I remember it's the time spent in VBI playing the music? How is the time calculated and how is that represented on screen? (I realize that may not know this yourself...) You set the colour when you start doing the task you want to time, then set it back again as soon as that task (in this case music playing) is finished. It's quick, it's dirty, but it works well. I've never found a better way of timing code on an 8-bit

Some C64 users do have Dual SIDs, giving them 6 channels. Now let's see what we get per channel shall we? The SID has one less channel per chip to start with, however with a bit of crafty waveform switching in there (let's not forget the multiple waveforms available here ) you can merge a bass instrument and drums to create the illusion of 2 channels where there is just one. On the pokey to get a C64 lead style effect or a nice bass sound where the distortion doesn't detune everything you chain 2 channels together. And having been sat around with RMT all night the resulting channel collisions are beginng to get on my t**s a little. So although the C64 has less channels you can get more out of them. You could well end up in the worst case with a SID tune that has 3 channels that sounds like 4 or 5 where the 4 channel pokey is cut down to 2 effective channels. ...but at the end of the day an instrument is only as good as the musician right?* *This might explain why my 8580 SID and pokey both sound lousy at this precise moment in time....

is there anyplace online I can get schematics for the SIO2PC cable and some idiot-friendly instructions (Again - another C64 escapee here ) on what to use for transfers? I have an atari 800XL, but I think my drive is well and truely buggered, I've lost the SIO cables and after reading this thread i'm beginning to think that going native to watch things is the only way to go for now... *edit* I'm being a complete and total tit aren't I? There's another thread further down the page explaining this thing? Doh...