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andym00

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Posts posted by andym00

  3. Posted

    BTW: Just turned off VBXE emulation for the first time in ages and the s-video output in Altirra is incredibly authentic. Looks just like output from a real machine using an LCD monitor, complete with little shadows around the characters. Amazing!

     

    Glad you mentioned that, because that explains why PAL artifacts didn't appear to work for me.. Forgot I still had VBXE enabled from some tinkerings :)

  4. Posted

    Personally I like something a little more luxurious than a 30+ year old basic, but then I'm probably a bit weird ;)

     

    I prefer to have all the data massaging as project(s) inside my solution, of which the main 6502 project has dependencies upon the other projects, which themselves have dependencies upon the raw source data, whatever that is.. Same thing for any magic tables.. Simply press one button and if needed whatever tools are rebuilt, run, and the final target data built from whatever source data, and then the final project built using the fresh and always up to date data..

    • Like 1

  5. Posted

    I recall there was some mention on the IDE thread about some option added to do only one instance, but I'm not mad about that way of doing things to be honest..

    As for VS, I've never seen any option to not tear down the processes created by starting a debug session, but I could be wrong as it's not something I've ever wanted to not do..

     

    I'm perfectly happy now anyway.. I can now export my breakpoints to a file and have the command line breakpoints constructed as part of the build process so it's as automagic as I want now, well from the point of being able to have breakpoints inserted each session anyway..

     

    edit: Oh crikey! And as luck would have it I've just found the .batch command in the debugger, so I guess that's everything I was looking for really when combined with the /debugcmd option..

    So now all you need is to do /debugcmd ".batch debuggercommands.txt" and bob's your sisters brother..

    Bingo.. Phaeron really has thought of everything :)

  6. Posted

    I guess my problem is that I'm being super lazy and using Visual Studio, so I press F5 it fires up Altirra, and when I rebuild or end debugging it simply tears down all the processes created by the debugging session, so I'm not running a persistent Altirra session over builds, which would be the answer then I'd only need to set things once per session.. I just like a nice environment that's as consistent as possible for my simple brain :)

     

    That said... I just was about to start adding something to Altirra to do what I want, when I found this in the command line processing code, which isn't mentioned in the help output on the command line..

     

    while(cmdLine.FindAndRemoveSwitch(L"debugcmd", arg)) {
debugMode = true;
debugModeSuspend = true;

dbg->QueueCommand(VDTextWToA(arg).c_str(), false);
}

     

    So, I can add debugger commands to the command line via /debugcmd "bp LabelName" for example..

    Which is almost exactly what I wanted..

     

    Now to write a utility match the export symbols to line numbers and then I can integrate the VS breakpoints directly into my build cycle, and just use F9 to enable/disable breakpoints :)

  7. Posted

    Is there any chance of having some way to set breakpoints from the command line or maybe, like Vice, a set of monitor commands that are loaded before execution begins although after any symbol file is loaded ?

     

    The /debug and /debugbreak command line options are really handy, but things can get a bit tedious having to re-enter the breakpoints..

  8. Posted

    How about a macro to add all the VBXE addresses to a relocation list ? And then patch them at run time ?

    !macro VBXE .VBXERegister {
  .codePC = *
  * = VBXERelocationTableTop
  !word .codePC
  VBXERelocationTableTop = *
  * = .codePC
  !word .VBXERegister-VBXEBase
}

    And somewhere at the end of the image terminate the list.. Obviously, it's not ideal since you need to have enough space allocated for the storage of the relocation table, but that just needs a warning of doom when it runs out of space at assembly time..

    That's if your assembler doesn't support relocation tables, in which case I'd just define the VBXE registers as externals, and then patch as you would when doing your late binding..

  9. Posted

    It's not terribly exciting. You have a header line that reads "Altirra symbol file" followed by a [symbols] group. Each symbol line is then of the form:

    mode address,length name

    Where mode is one or more of the characters rwx for read/write/execute, the address is a 16-bit hex address without any prefix, the length is a hex length in bytes without a prefix, and the name is just the symbol name. A zero length indicates a symbol of indeterminate length. The main use of the rwx flags is to disambiguate the hardware read-only and write-only registers that occupy the same addresses, but it's a moot point in that case as the debugger's internal hardware symbols have priority when loaded.

     

    Cool, so it is as straight forward as I thought then.. Just wanted to support everything that was possible since the debugger is getting a lot of use here..

  10. Posted

    Any chance that someone has a file that demonstrates the full use of the Altirra label files ?

    I want to quickly add proper Altirra label output to Acme 0.93 whilst I'm changing some other things in it today, and so far I've added CC65 label support for now, but would like to add proper Altirra label file support since it seems there's all manner of groups, RWE flags and other goodies lurking in the specification..

  11. Posted

    I must admit, I would kill for a PAL60 (well, essentially an overclocked CPU) mode purely for development purposes.. A lot of the time I code using NTSC just because it's a smoother ride under emulation :)

     

    (null)

  12. Posted

    Mine arrived this morning all safe and sound though had received a good squishing somewhere along the line.. All in good shape though :)

    Looks fantastic though with the box and everything.. Very professional..

    Thanks a lot for this, for this run, for such an awesome product and the rapid rate of knots it made it here given the time of year..

  17. Posted

    It quite possibly is the most common CPU in existence when you count the successors and imbedded applications.

     

    I think that honour goes to the 8051 which has shipped several billion units since it came out in 1980.

     

    Surely ARM gets that with their January 2011 report that they'd shipped 15 Billion processors.. Which is a staggering number quite frankly!

  20. Posted

    But this scrolling/Enemys C64 moving Hi-resolution 50fps would need to be 25fps on A8 because of colour clock movement...

    Wouldn't it be possible (or would it look good?) if we use 25fps and we would then have:

    -> frame1: scrolling

    -> frame2: soft sprites

    -> frame3: scrolling

    -> frame4; soft sprites

    and so on...

    Would this look bad, like SCROLL/STOP/SCROLL/STOP/... chewed/choking?

     

    On the c64 the screen has to scroll in 2 pixel (one multicolour pixel) steps anyway otherwise the background layer would judder by one (hires) pixel each move..

    When you're walking in those games, the screen is scrolling at a rate of one multicolour clock per frame, therefore the background layer done through charset switching is only really moving every 2 frames, but in fact the charset is changing every frame.. If you see what I mean :)

    The A8 will be exactly the same as the 64 in this regard..

  25. Posted

    All I'm talking about is something like this, though I'll describe it for one charset, though it just needs duplicating for 3 sets..

    I've tried looking for the 6502 I wrote for doing this, but it's not on either desktop machine here, so it's lurking on one of the laptops somewhere..

     

    In c brain dump because I'm half asleep still, but it's nothing complex at all..

    int charmap1[VirtualCharacterSetSize];
int charmap2[HardwareCharacterSetSize];
int refcount[HardwareCharacterSetSize];

// Insert a character from the larger virtual character set into the actual hardware character set and return the character index it's now located in..
int insertCharacter(int character)
{
if (charmap1[character] != -1)
{
 refcount[charmap1[character]]++;
 return charmap1[character];
}
if (freecount == 0) return -1;

int dstchar = freelist[freecount]
freecount--;
refcount[dstchar]++;
charmap1[character] = dstchar;
charmap2[dstchar] = character;
memcopy(&charsetHW[dstchar*, &charsetSW[srcchar*8], ;
return destchar;
}

// Release a reference on a character in the hardware character set.. If there's no more references to it in use, then free the character..
void freeCharacter(int character)
{
refcount[character]--;
if (refcount[character]) return;

charmap1[charmap2[character]] = -1; // Clearing the 2 maps isn't important really, unless you want to debug sensibly..
charmap2[character] = -1;

freecount++;
freelist[freecount] = character;
}

     

    What I like about this, is it's not expensive at all, and also allows the levels to use >256 characters rather nicely since we can support 9/10/11 bit character sets.. Hell, you can even make it appear like you have hardware XY flipping available by making 2 of the bits control that..

    There's probably some mistake in the above, as I'm coffee free and running around like a loon while just brain dumping that, but the idea should be simple enough..

    • Like 1
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