jeffpiep

POKEY emulation on a Pico is an exciting thought! I was thinking about POKEY audio emulation on a Pico to get stereo POKEY on Atari 8-bit without needing a real second POKEY IC. My plan was to use the PIO/DMA to handle the registers and to create a phi2-driven counter that the free running software could use to pace the audio circuit emulation. For PWM output, I did some calculations and think one can get 11-bit effective resolution at 61-kHz sampling rate derived from the 125 MHz system clock. I think this should be enough to emulate the compressive behavior of a summation of POKEY 4-bit DACs. The PWM peripheral also supports clock driven DMA, so the emulation could run in software and its output automatically pushed to the PWM circuit. What sparked this idea was proving out a USB keyboard adapter that piggybacks the POKEY. If you're actively working this, i'm happy to share my notes and to collaborate. Here's my USB keyboard POKEY code: https://github.com/jeffpiep/pokeyusb

@David_P and @reifsnyderb - you're right about the IRQ. I suspect having the IRQ will make it easier to port over the SIO FujiNet libraries to PBI. @tschak909 made good use of the IRQ on the SIO interface. And the Apple ][ lack of IRQ resulted in lots of polling. OK, will think about PBI.

@reifsnyderb I think we have common interests. (@tschak909 suggested I reach out.) I want to get a parallel bus FujiNet going (my thought is cartridge because of broad usability). I've had my head down the last couple years developing the Apple ][ and Mac-68k FujiNets, but am having serious Atari withdrawls. For Mac-68k, I ended up putting a Pico between the ESP32 and the MCI/DCD port because of critical timing requirements. I've learned enough of the Pico hardware, including PIO and DMA, that I'm ready to tackle a parallel bus. My initial thoughts are to use @mozzwald's A8 PicoCart variant as a development hardware prototype interfacing it over USB to an ESP32-S3. Have you thoughts about where to go with the firmware? In one way, I can see doing what you did with the Pico XEP 80 and writing a Pico adaptor between the Atari parallel bus and the ESP serial port (although it'd be a tinyUSB CDC device because the cartridge port uses up almost all the pins on the Pico - not sure if it's possible to access a UART.) Another place to start is simply adapting the PicoCart firmware to communicate with the ESP (the Fuji device) to enable CONFIG and loading cart ROMs over TNFS. But that isn't necessarily a straight path to leveraging the existing FujiNet firmware and the more powerful N: device features. Anyway, I'm completely open to other ideas on where initially to head.

I’m game. Happy to work with anyone else interested. I learned how to use the PIOs and DMA on the PICO as a lookup table much like a ROM. Should be totally doable. Add the ESP32 with the FujiNet interface with external power and this thing becomes usable on the 2600+ too.

That's a great scan. I don't remember what I based the font on, but will go check to see. IIRC, I had a partial set from the manual and made up the missing characters. At least I can check my font against this and make corrections if needed.

The XEP80-II is a great project! My XEP80 overheats - I run it without the case. I can't find a good affordable display to use with it because it clocks the output at the wrong rates for NTSC. I have one out of about 5 displays the mostly works with it. And you're right to keep compatibility. You are also right about people talking about emulators for a couple of years and not doing much. I started thinking about it when I acquired my hardware a couple years ago. Finally, I decided to do something about it. I started an XEP80 emulator on June 6th using the FujiNet hardware as the development platform. There's an XEP80 branch in the FujiNet github project if anyone is curious. I have a 9-bit UART receiver and the XEP80 state machine from atari800 running. This will be the last post I put here about it. Good luck on your project!

@FreddieBear I had a nice Thanksgiving, thank-you! I hope yours was likewise. It turns out the entire Epson font family takes 2MB of flash storage which is too much for the device right now. I'd like to keep the size small because we don't know what other future features we'll need the flash for. Which are most important fonts to you? For example, here's a small group: 8=PICA with all 8 options (regular, doublestrike, italic, double+ital) x 2 for underline. 2=PICA expanded (regular only) 2=Condensed (and expanded) regular 2=Elite (and expanded) regular I attached an example I made using BASIC. Please, let me know what you think. printout-30.pdf

@FreddieBear I think you're doing everything right. The problem is on my side as I have not implemented any special text in the Epson emulator on FujiNet. Sorry I sent you on a wild goose chase! I made the Epson emulator primarily for PrintShop figuring most people would use one of the several Atari printer emulators for word processing output. All the Atari emulators have their complete respective font sets. I custom wrote from scratch all the FujiNet printer emulators to run native on the ESP32 and created many of the OpenType fonts for the Atari character sets based on real output. If you're interested, the source code for the printers is here: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-platformio/tree/master/lib/printer-emulator. I can add spiffing up the Epson emulator to my to do list to try and supply the basic extras like bold, italics and underline. I'm glad to see you using it! Thank-you for trying it out and testing.

This would stress the EPSON FX emulator some more: That post prompted me to ask C.B. if we could screen dump the color pixel data instead of ESC/P dot graphics - he wrote the GRANTIC screen dump. The Okimate is getting there ... i'll have something soon for printing with its COLOR print utility.

GRANTIC source code by @ClausB Use with the GRANTIC P: emulator GRANTIC.SRC.txt

Got it - Firefox opens it. It's curious how all the different readers handle errors. I need to track down what Acrobat doesn't like in that file. Thanks!

@ClausB==Dr. Seuss! He sent me his source code to post, too. I should get that out there. See this post for instructions and a demo ATR:

Thanks for stressing the emulator! The EPSON FX emulator sets the first line to print on the bottom of the previous page. I had to do this to make The Print Shop output OK. A work around is to execute a linefeed right before printing. I could make another instance of the emulator that starts at the top of the page as expected - that might be easiest for everyone. P.S. I could not open the DDIIDOC1.pdf file.

This is amazing. I can't believe the emulator did this! Can you attach the SVG file? I'd love to see what it output.

oh shoot - use Internet Explorer it surprisingly works. Ugh. There's an updated file in IDF that the Arduino framework hasn't picked up yet. @jamm says to ... "try replacing the file <your_user_profile>.platformio\packages\framework-arduinoespressif32\tools\sdk\lib\libesp_http_server.a with the one attached here. Make a backup of the existing file, of course." libesp_http_server.a

Here's instructions on installing VSCode and PlatformIO so you can get the firmware and upload to a dev board. https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/atariwifi/wiki/Board-Bring-up-for-PLATFORM.IO-code The firmware should run without an SD card. You might run out of SPIFFS space if you print a large file. But it's worth a shot!

FujiNet now has the ability to do screen captures to PNG when used with a version of @ClausB's PRANTIC. Claus wrote a new version called GRANTIC that sends the 8-bit color data to P: and from that FujiNet builds a 320x192 pixel PNG. Thank-you Claus! This is a neat capability. Instructions for those following along with their own devices: Mount the attached grantic.ATR, which is a DOS 2.5 boot disk with GRANTIC loading in AUTORUN.SYS. Boot this to BASIC. From a browser navigate to your FujiNet's IP (homepage). Select the "GRANTIC" printer emulator from the drop down list. There are two simple demo programs (GR2.BAS and GR3.BAS) on the ATR. Run either of those. When you no longer hear SIO traffic buzz, download the printout from the browser. The magic happens with a call to USR(8192). Sample output: grantic.atr

Sorry about that! We need to make a simple web interface to allow switching printers. Change line 162 in main.cpp to sioP.connect_printer(new(atari1027));

For some more background there is a 1985 Scientific American "Computer Recreations" article on the math for Mandlebrot sets.

Sorry for the necropost and I may have missed it but did you publish your 825 printer font?

@playsoft Paul, I'd like to get the emulator behavior right. Right now, I send all SIO 'W' data to text and 'P' data to graphics. Should I be using the Aux1 instead sending 'N' to text and 'L' to graphics? Or is it a combination of command and aux1? Thanks Jeff

Thank-you for the information and disassembling and commenting the example code from the user's manual. I was just guessing at how this worked by watching SIO traffic. Good to have the confirmation based on the example program. Jeff

@ClausB I was thinking of - PRANTIC 6502 code captures graphics and sends over SIO in some format. - ESP32 receives over SIO and converts graphics into a color PNG much like an emulator screen capture. I don't know if this is an appropriate use of the PRANTIC emulation of ANTIC and GTIA. -Jeff

This is neat. I will try to use it to test the Epson emulator. I was imagining a program that would send all the grahpics/screen states to the FujiNet, which would then emulate the screen and the generate a modern graphics file (e.g., PNG). Would it be difficult to port it to C++ and run it on the ESP32?

Oh, and Epson CTRL codes could be interpret by the ESP. Need to research using an Epson with 850 or XEP 80 to understand what we need on the Atari side.