Cybernoid

Thanks! This is very helpful. You are right, when the luma differs it is not very nice on the eyes. So, I will avoid this. (I may avoid using flicker altogether, but I wanted to go through the exercise.) You are right according to the way I wrote it. If you have a linear set of shades 0, 2, 4, 6 you can produce these shades: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 (7 shades). But if you have these shades: 0,2,6,8 you can produce: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 (9 shades). Which was what I was using to calculate. Actually if you have these shades: 0,2,6,14 you can produce these shades: 0,1,2,3,4,6,7,8,10,14 (10 shades!). But, I may not use this since it will cause bad flicker... Okay, I will keep this in mind, and come up with a different way to produce colors... Thanks _C_

Well, that is true, and my PC TV capture card does not flicker at all!

Well, I am working on another game, and I was wondering what you think of graphics modes. The graphics mode I am thinking of using is ANTIC mode 4 but change the character set and colors every VBI. VBI 1 colors: Black, Red, Green, Blue VBI 2 colors: Black, Magenta, Cyan, Yellow So color mixing will provide 16 colors. Also, I may use: VBI 1 colors: Black, grey25, grey50, grey75 VBI 2 colors: Black, grey25, grey50, grey75 But with different character sets, this will provide 9 shades of grey, but I will use PM overlays, like in JellyBeans, in areas. (ignoring the 5th color for now). Anyway, my basic question is, "Do you mind this sort of flicker in a game?" I plan on only alternating between 2 sets of colors/charsets, so the flicker is not too bad (according to my TV experiments), or do you think I should just stay with 5 colors only? Thanks, _C_

Hey, I found all my old BBS download disks from back in the day. On these disks are a few demos, a few games, and a few utilities... Some of these are simple Basic demos, but I still like "KILCOMIE.BAS" and "APPLE.BAS"... hehehe. Anyway, I have about thousand more disks of games and demos to weed through, so this stuff isn't exactly organized yet... _C_ bbs_downloads1.zip

Hi Fandal! How about playing the creator? I will be available (during my lunch hour) at 11:00am to 12:00 my time (18:00 - 19:00 your time). Also, check out the new release Version 1.0.2: http://geocities.com/vlastaar/jellybeans/j...eans_v1_0_2.zip The READ.ME is a great idea. I will add one to the released versions... Anyone else available? _C_ PS - I cannot guarantee that network mode will work at the moment, but having a few testers would be great!!!

Oh. Yup, this basically answers my questions.... Hmm, have to look at G2F again. Also, isn't there a way to allow ANTIC to load instructions, then turn off the instruction DMA to allow ANTIC to display one line over and over again? Is there a way to cause GTIA to output video data on line 21 (NTSC)? Thanks...

I noticed that you can turn on the GTIA modes and use ANTIC mode 2, for a Character-mapped 16 luma or 16 color screen. Has any program used this? Is it possible for G2F to handle this? This thinking out loud, _C_

As a related question, is there an autorun.sys program for DOS 2.0 that allows for high speed SIO, or a patch for DOS 2.0?

Does your PC lock up or your Atari? I usually use the RI "Serial Control" option. I think this is what you will want with a one chip interface. The safety margin is useful if your PC is slow, but I assume that this is not the case. I would try 2 or 3, just to see... Adjust the Framing Threshold only if your Atari locks up after is switches to high speed SIO... These suggestions are only if the Atari is locking up, not the PC... _C_

Andreas, Since you seem to be the most interested in this project, let me ask you a few questions... (1) I am thinking of abandoning the 5bit and 4bit playback options, and stick with just 6bit. I do not like the quantization error (thus, high freq hiss) introduced with these modes. (2) I have a load routine that will read WAV files in a multitude of formats. But the load time can be very long. For example, if I load a 16-bit signed Stereo PCM encoded wave file, my program will do: (a) Throw away LSB of each sample. (b) Left/Right Channel mixing. © Low Pass filtering for the correct play back frequency (d) Resample to 11025Hz. So playback is 6bit at 11025Hz. The end result sounds great, but it takes over 2.5 hours to load a Wave file into an Atari with a 1MB memory upgrade. (a 16MB Wave file will be reduced to 1MB-8bit-signed-mono data). So, is the wait worth it? I suppose I could break this into 2 programs: one with all the DSP functions for filtering and resampling and one strickly for playback... Thoughts? _C_

Have you tried adjusting the "Framing Threshold" above 7 or the "Safety Margin" under "Basic Serial Setup"?

Yeah, I was thinking about this today actually. I see that you can feed Player/missle data directly to GTIA, but how do we feed pixel/playfield data to the GTIA? Doesn't it use the AN[2:0] bus from the ANTIC chip?

Andreas, I am working on just such a program. The previous programs were examples to show that it could be done. I have thus so far integrated the extended memory bank and MaxFlash versions into one program. It has a simple directory listing and file selection utility as well as options to playback files at 4-bit, 5-bit or 6-bit quatizations. I am testing this with DOS 2.0 to be sure that it works on most computers. Also, it automatically finds out how much extended memory is in your machine and uses this memory. It is configurable to load wav files as well as signed/unsigned 16-bit/8-bit stereo/mono PCM data. It can resample WAV files as well, but the processing time is fairly large. I have some code working now for the MyIDE version, as well as a program to do RAW DATA writes to the MyIDE disk. (As a side note, I figured out that some IDE drives can be placed into 8-bit data mode, thus allowing us to double our disk space with MyIDE....) So, the program will automatically detect extended memory banks, 1Mb or 8Mb MaxFlash cart, and internal or external MyIDE interfaces for playback.... -C-

Hi all, I was just curious, but is there anyone out there watching this forum who happens to also work as a video game programmer for a living? (i.e. - you just don't just have video games and Atari as a hobby, but also actually program for today's systems...) Bill Kendrick? Albert? Cheers, Chris/Cybernoid

hehehehehe. Wouldn't that need to be 0100100001001111 0100100001001111 0100100001001111 for Santa-bot? And remember don't get Christmas confused with Halloween: Oct(31) = Dec(25) ~C~

Hmmm, it looks like Yeahronimo is mostly interested in the MP3 Players (Mpet and Fpet) that Tulip was producing as well as using the Commodore name for trademark infringement lawsuits... Most likely we will not see any other "C64" hardware other than the C64DTV...

yes' date=' ofcourse. [/quote'] Oh, yeah. You are right... If it outputs PAL/NTSC, then it is YUV. no, all the filtering and chrominance mixing is done during pal signal decoding. Oh yeah, you are right again if you are talking about the PAL decoder in the TV. Sorry, I was thinking about ANTIC/GTIA as a PAL encoder and effects being introduced here...

Has anyone tested a PS2->USB adaptor with the USB cart? I might have to pick one of these up: http://www.redoctane.com/redpademscover.html I would like to start coding a Dance Pad game with RMT music for background music... Maybe Tatqoo would do some great tunes? ~C~

It can be argued that the eye works in Luminance/Chrominance since there are receptors for brightness only and for color only, but any way you look at it, the eye/brain perceives more changes in Luminance than in Chrominance. So, RGB is optimized for the spectrum, but not optimized for how the eye works. In other words, you can see subtle changes in brightness better than subtle changes in color. So if you build a color space that uses more brightness than color, you can store information changes we can "see" and ignore those we cannot. That is what YUV or YIQ tries to do. I cannot remember, but this color space may take into account the fact that the eye cannot detect blue or red as well as yellow or green... MPEG uses YUV/YIQ instead of RGB for this reason, it is more efficient according to what we can see, not to what theoretically can be seen. Does the 8-bit use YUV? Also, in normal Antic modes you can select from 16 colors, but from only 8 brightness levels. You would need more brightness levels for this to be optimized, but technically, 16 and 8 levels can be detected by the eye anyway... However, I do think that this is an optimal way to store the information in the registers: color/brightness. I just wish there were more brightness levels. Technically, these would be pal encoder effects. Going from digital data to TV you go through a PAL/NTSC/SECAM encoder, from analog to digital, you go through a decoder... Anyway, we are way off topic here... Back to topic... My mom bought an Atari 400 back in 1979 complete with casette drive! I used this until 1985, when my dad bought me a 130XE upgraded with Omnimon, and the OSB Roms. My parents were divorced, so one weekend I traded my 400 to my dad for the 130XE with 2 1050 drives (one Happy), and a MPP-1000E 300BPS modem. I have used this machine ever since then (except for the 300bps modem). My dad bought me a 520ST in 1987. I used both Atari machines since then for games and BBSing during high school and college. I eventually upgraded the ST to 4Meg in 1997 and put it into an arcade cabinet in 1999... Thanks to Atari I am an Electrical Engineer today... but wish I had become a video game programmer... Pictures of my stuff:

Interesting.... This is the exact direction I wanted our Ataris to go... if we can redo our 8bits in a single chip, then they can be placed in all sorts of devices, and especially handheld ones... Maybe Atari should release an MP3/Video game handheld... more info: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...10530250.htm?1c

Pozdrawiam Meg.

These are two good features, and easy to implement. I will add the possibility to delete chars in the player's name field and also a way to restart the game in the middle... Thanks for the input, and if anyone wants to add any other suggestions, let me know... Thanks, =C=

I would like to release a version of JellyBeans to everyone, so.... here it is... I am still updating a few features, but you can play around with it in the meantime. Also, check out Adam's great title screen!!!! Also, the title screen music, although not fantastic, was written by myself, but in 1987. (Music plays on PAL version only). In game music can be selected/changed form the options menu. Notice that this disks are full of the RMT music examples, so instead of JellyBeans having its own music, you can create your own to play. To create music for JellyBeans use RMT, but save the RMT file as a stripped RMT file for address $4000. The maximum size of a music file is 4k, since I have only allowed music form address $4000 to $5000. Save RMT files as *.RMT to the JellyBeans disk! The terminal needs to be debugged some, but.... So, there you have it... JellyBeans is a Game, a Music Player and a Terminal. Enjoy! Please checkout the website, too: http://geocities.com/vlastaar/jellybeans/ Cheers and Merry XMAS, Chris/Cybernoid[/url] jellybeans_1_0_1.zip

I am trying to support 1088 memory as well as 256 memory for the XE. Do many people have the 1088 upgrade? I have written some code into the player to support 1088, but it currently crashes, so I have some questions on how to get this to work. How do we use the basic and selftest bits in this mode? My program crashes when I set these for some reason... I thought about supporting wav files and their 44byte header, but most wave files will need to be converted anyway... Also, I use goldwave to translate wav, mp3s, etc into 8bit mono at 13kHz with light hiss removal. Goldwave: http://www.goldwave.com/release.php _-~C~-_

Below are the files for the 6bit PCM player, both for the standard XE and the MaxFlash Cart. The player shows the audio waveform (red) and the file progress (blue) on screen. I will have a better write-up later, but the XE version is autoloading. The MaxFlash version uses the Flip.atr to program the Flash and the pcmplayer.atr to boot and play the data. The Flip.bin file can be used in the emulator modified by Steve. More information on using the emulator here: http://atarimax.com/flashcart/documentatio...7.html#download Cheers, _C_ pcmplay_xe.zip maxflash_pcmplayer2.zip flip_atr.zip flip_binb.zip