shoestring

Nice and elegant solution. Thanks Jac.

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Thanks for the feedback. But I think this needs some re-working as I'm not entirely happy using player missile graphics, for reasons mentioned in post #48. I'll think I'll keep the table and indicate which bit is bad via text instead of using the player gfx. What's tricky is that I need to keep the display list in rom ( and i can't make changes to screen memory on the fly ).There are 8 bits, so that's 8^2 = 256 possible combinations and I doubt that I can store that many combos. Maybe just have 8 of them and stop at the first bad bit detected.

The Amiga 1000 completely mesmerized me when I first saw one late at night looking through a shop window. It was displaying a high res interlaced image of a red Ferrari on a 1081, it flickered like mad but it was still cool to see.

I'm currently porting a game from the Apple 2 to the A8 Is there a more efficient way to verify 128kb of ram instead of writing/reading back arbitrary values in the other 4 ram banks ? For example. LDA #$FF STA portb LDA #$55 ; store arbitrary value in normal ram STA $4000 LDA portb EOR #$1C STA portb LDA #$AA ; store arbitrary value in bank 0 - extended memory STA $4000 LDA portb ORA #$1C ; switch back to normal ram STA portb LDA $4000 CMP #$55 ; $4000 should still contain initial value of #$55 BNE NG JMP LOADIMAGES NG ... ... cheers!!

My 1050 is brand new and I can confirm the same readings on the DMM

I wouldn't say any. Try a hdtv with lack of options to change the aspect ratio from 16:9. Even on my Samsung which typically have better scalers than other brands doesn't compare to a good CRT.

Svideo is good enough through a decent monitor like this PVM. Not everyone knows how to solder so some will favour the Antonia board. If you have more than one machine get both.

Id have to say not until 1995, I remember seeing ads for PCs in magazines and they were damn expensive, 2000-5000k for a basic system whilst you could get an Amiga 500 or ST for under $900. Pentiums were out of reach in terms of price for most consumers when those first came on to the market. And the folks that I knew who owned PCs stuck with their 486sx/dxs models for quite some time until prices became more affordable. I still used an Amiga exclusively until 1996 when I got a good deal on Pentium motherboard and yet it still took several weeks before I could finish my build as I got parts for it. The Amiga become too expensive to maintain and upgrade by this point.

It doesn’t need any of the support logic either. Everything is on the Antonia board.

It is a bit tight as mentioned, with the Antonia upgrade you'll need to leave the RF shield off. Here is a good demo of it. All PAL models a monitor port but you'll need to mod it for svideo. Later models don't support svideo, the original 800 does. If you can't do this yourself there's always the UAV.

Yes, you can get an Antonia 4MB upgrade. I'm not sure where you live but If you can get your hands on a PAL 600XL then it's well worth it. NTSC version does not have a monitor port.

I used mine for testing DRAMs. The apple 2e has a very good built in diag / self test.

Apple 2 version seems a little sluggish but we all know an Atari version would run rings around it. The c64 version is by far the best, very smooth and fluid which is needed for accurate jumps and precise movements.

Or reverse engineer the Apple 2 version and enhance it? If the c64 version uses the memory underneath the IO registers as many games do ( $d000-$d3ff ) then it's gonna require an overhaul of the code, not to mention a complete re-write of the sprite engine. I don't know how that can be done with a 64kb system.

I have the same issue with my NTSC Atari 800. I cannot get a decent picture on the LCD or colour on my Commodore 1084S so I bought a PVM. You might find that the 800xl will look even better than the XE after the mods. The XE suffers from vertical banding in stock machines. Your might have one of the machines made in Hong Kong that had the wrong value resistor installed ( 390ohms instead of 100ohms ) which caused signal impedance in the video output to be mismatched resulting in a blurry screen. They fixed that when they moved the production to Taiwan. Once you replace that resistor with a 75ohm and do the rest of the mods, the display comes to life. You could also get yourself a UAV upgrade.

That's a shame, most of the good BBSs were over in Europe and I couldn't really afford to call them at the time. The Amiga would have been worth keeping purely based on the demos coming out and the cool freeware apps that were around at the time ( Protracker, DPaint .etc ). Games came secondary for me. A mate of mine used to call all these different European BBSs and download the latest demos and stuff like the LSD docs, Grapevine (a disk magazine ). Amiga disk magazines were the best way to get info on the latest hardware and software since the magazines in the news agents were expensive and always arrived 3 months late. None of us had jobs at the time, so my mate would bring boxes of floppy disks and we'd go through them one by one over a case of beer & some fish & chips. Fun times indeed!

Epyx typically had smooth animations in their c64 games. See Summer Games..etc

It's an NTSC monitor made by Toshiba. I've never seen a Commodore branded monitor than can handle both ( NTSC & PAL ) in colour. It should be able to to sync up with a PAL signal but you won't get any colour. If you want a monitor than can do both in colour then look at the Sony PVM series. It will work fine with your Ataris. It can handle RGB, Composite and Separate Y/C. https://gona.mactar.hu/Commodore/monitor/schematics/1080A_Color_Monitor_Service_Manual_3140041-02_With_Schematic.pdf

Apple argued that it would be too confusing for the average user. Just having 1 button meant that the user did not have to remember which mouse button to press.

First modem was a US Robotics 9600 Sportster. By sending some init strings to it, it would then support the 16.8k HST/DS. I still have this modem. Second was a US Robotics Courier v.everything. Amiga sysops loved them.

I tried to do it this way but I could not get the case to close flush after routing the video cable through the existing colour pot hole in the cage, and the groove used by the modulator cable. I deduced that the video cable was too thick.. Maybe there was something I missed but having thought of this for awhile during work, I decided to do it internally and did just that. If anyone is reading and is deciding to do it this way. Dont forget to attach the grounds to the points on the green block, solder the two wires together on the other end to a ground point somewhere on the pcb ( c176 is a practical location on the main board ). I was getting vertical banding on the monitor without it..

Having the ability to switch between NTSC and PAL would definitely be a plus. How does it handle fast action games like Uridium and Sanxion? Looking forward to seeing what the full sized version has to offer but I’m fairly content with my real c64, for now.

Sorry, not a fan. As already mentioned above. If you need to use a real keyboard for any reason then it’s going to consume even more desk space, in that case you’re better off using a real machine or stick with an emulator like WinVice.

I don't see the point in wasting $100 bucks on a turd when I can get a real c64 for around the same price. All c64s will handle svideo and the picture quality is outstanding on a nice CRT. Especially the 64c models & c128 where the video quality was improved significantly.