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Keatah

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Posts posted by Keatah

  1. Posted

    doubt it.. just another lull in the cycle. As a matter of fact I was wondering about building a co-processor card with 4 6502's to do some extremely rudimentary 3-d acceleration for the apple II series. I may of course, come up with something entirely different perhaps 2 z-80's or a modified pc-transporter card. Something! I just got this idea a few weeks ago. The software would be a bitch though.. the hardware, phaaagghh - that's easy!

  2. Posted

    Wasn't the C=64 able to "multi-task" while loading from the 1541 drive? Or at least do graphical animations while data was being loaded?

     

    The apple design didn't permit that, at least not very well, as the onboard main 6502 was responsible for both the drive and everything else in the computer. You could alternate reading and processing very quickly, but not simultaneously like the c64 .. ?? Thoughts?

  5. Posted

    One other thing, I hate to point out tiny things, but to me it's fun.

     

    When typing the name of the rom, using my favorite example, Video Pinball (1981) (Atari).BIN, the interface stops parsing after the o in video. Seems to be a problem with the <space>. Something similar happens with G.I. Joe - Cobra Strike (1983) (Parker Bros).BIN, stops parsing after the G, so here the "." is the problem.

     

    The search box at the upper right corner works fine afaict.

     

    And the green font color in the classic ui, can we make that red or blue or give us a choice?

    And how about the boarder? The grey outline should have a menu choice to allow you to select the thickness and color, or even presence or absence of it! (just joking here)

     

    When you have such a nice and fully featured program it tends to make folks *look* even harder for bugs and tiny annoyances. Like a new car, the tiniest scratch and you're back at the dealer..

  7. Posted

    Here is probably one of the easiest 'bugs' to fix.. Or rather feature changes.

     

    You know, in the rom selection screen.. where you can start typing the name of a game, say videopinball, and the selector bar scrolls down to the first game title with a V in it, then as you continue typing it makes its way down to all the games that start with VI, now everything with VI comes up.. And eventually you make your way to VIDEO PINBALL.

     

    Well all that stuff works just fine, however, the speed at which you have to type is too fast. Way too fast. Can you slow it down to z26 speeds or something about 1/5th what is is now.

     

    Too many times I'd start typing V then I then D, and if not done quickly enough, you end up going through the games that start with D.

  8. Posted

    Also, remember that Apple got around all kinds of FCC issues by first selling their computers as kits (completely avoids FCC regulations) and then not selling them as TV connectible devices. This is why they could run ribbon cables out the back with impunity. Atari and Commodore both needed IO schemes where the emissions could be carefully controlled.

     

    There's more urban legend than truth to this. The FCC workaround had to do with the RF conversion, not the drive cabling AFAIK. And note that the later Unidisk/Duodisk interface for the IIe ran essentially the same set of signals in a shielded cable without regulatory difficulty.

     

    The sad truth is that Atari and Commodore both approached the problem of a peripheral bus from the perspective of corporate hardware engineers, and came up with design-by-committee solutions that worked ... satisfactorily (well, in Atari's case -- Commodore botched the job completely).

     

    Woz, on the other hand, looked at it from the perspective of a hacker and produced what may be the single most beautiful board design in the history of personal computing. The hands-down best disk controller of the 8 bit era had eight (yes, eight) chips, two of which were just ROMs. The 810 and 1541 are embarrassments in comparison: they need a CPU, firmware (a little in the 810, a ton in the 1541), kilobytes of RAM, a custom ASIC disk controller (in the 810), and a big honking power supply to deal with all of that.

     

    Apple needed the PCB, a ribbon cable, and a painted box.

     

     

    My first apple ][+ I got in what ?? 78 or 79? (I'd need to see the receipt) was big on having rf shielding clamps and foil plates for the disk ][ interface.

     

    I remember how complex setting up the apple ][ and the disk ][ were, to a 6 year old anyways, compared to atari's approach. Atari had a nice 'consumer friendly' cable and power brick. I mean with the apple there was like 20 differrent ways to route the ribbon cable out the back of the computer! Ohh well, misc ramblings..

     

    Apple's simple approach with 8 chips on the controller card *IS* insanely simple. As the other 4 were like PAL gate arrays and basic 74LS series. Couldn't be more than 100 transistors per chip. And the analog controller board *IN* the disk drive itself was even more elegant. All it did was amplify stepper motor signals to drive the head, turn the main motor on/off, and shape the pulses from the head/magenetic media. Again, done with a simple op-amp and a fist full of transistors.

  9. Posted

    yes, what you said seems about right. I just noticed that the Apple II series 5.25 drives seemed snappy in response to commands from the 6502, and just as seemingly quick when you'd type CATALOG at the prompt. It would seem the head snaps into position much quicker and there is significantly less time between the spin-up of the disk and actual start of the data transfer.

     

    Whereas in a pc floppy (or the worst offender being a C= 1541) there is delay between the drive getting the "read" command and delivering the first bits of data.

     

    Sure. a pc drive would xfer data at a faster rate than the disk][ from apple. But the response time to "start of delivery" seems much longer.

     

    Perhaps it is all an illusion or something else is going on.

  10. Posted

    From the Apple ][+

     

    I wish the atari was more serious, it always had the aura of a toy.

    I also wish the text modes on the atari were better..while more colorful and varied than the apple ][, they were not very fast or responsive.

     

    And, I wish the atari had a more connected feel to external peripherals. All the addon stuff like tape drives and disk drives and printers always seemed too 'far' away from the main 6502 and memory. Too many 'support' chips and custom chips getting 'in-the-way.'

     

    The apple II had a printer that practically sat right on the main address bus, along with the disk drive and 16k memory card and whatever other peripheral you could come up with. CP/M yeh.. that too. Yehp, the main 6502 would basically control the disk drive mechanism itself, step the heads, compute the timing and grab the data and dump it to memory. All by itself, so to speak. The drive was interfaced to the main memory by no more than ahandful of logic gates. Whereas the atari (and c64 and amiga and modern pc's) have all sorts of complex circuitry that seems to just take up space and waste time.

  12. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    All the "Atari vs. Commodore" threads (genuine as well as impromptu) have me think, how about a reverse on this concept:

     

    The Apple IIgs. Don't know much about this machine either, but would have bought one if there was an Atari counterpart!

     

     

     

    Any thoughts?

     

     

    The 520st was in response to both the Amiga and //GS, I think..

    And anyways, I always wanted the atari to be a real computer and not consigned to the living room.

  13. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    As somebody said something earlier..THAT is the reason I don't like modern games on consoles. For what should be a fast half-hour game, it drags on for days and weeks and you have to learn 20+ buttons and all sorts of combinations to do useless tricks and 'routines'. All that in addition to an instruction book (or online info) that takes 2 hours to read.. in order to play a mindless (read as extremely linear) game.

     

    But, now, for example, there is Orbiter SpaceFlight Simulator. It uses 2 Joysticks for 6 degrees of freedom and requires a 101 button controller to correctly operate, the documentation is way over 1000 pages. In some cases 70+ pages are allocated to the details and operations of one spacecraft. There is no purpose to the game, you just do whatever. And since the game came out in 2000 or so, it will work on the most basic of PC's today. But, since the game is updated constantly, it will make use of today's most modern PC offerings.

     

    That's the extreme opposite of Asteroids and Combat on the 2600, and I love'em both.

     

    And just because something is new does not make it better. Much new tech these days is bug-ridden and requires you to learn thinking in strange ways to make it work. Or requires to you update firmware or some other un-natural trick. Who ever heard of having to have your blew-rae player connect to the internet to update firmware because it won't play a disc because the studios have changed the protection scheme? Why? It *was* working before? Why change it? Asshole suits and marketing drones.. My vcr is 22 years old and I never had to update the software or play a special manufacturers tape or hook it to the phone line in order to allow it to *continue* working.

     

    *THAT* is what I really hate about stuff, update this, update that.. blaaaarrrghhh blaaaagggh! Explain that to a 3 year old whos bawwlllinng his head off about why he can't watch Cinderella or Barbie. They don't care, they want it *N*O*W* Immediately, and if you(parent) don't comply you have a screaming brat all evening.. And all the restrictions and things that have to happen right. Registrations, codes, activations.. PFFFAAAGGGHHHH! All the minutiae that needs to happen before something works right. And when it does, only YOU figured it out. You have to explain it all over again to somebody who has never used (it). Whatever (it) may be.

     

    And those horrible customer support agents that take 20 minutes to get a hold of, and when you do speak with them they all talk funny and CANNOT UNDERSTAND what you say. No, no, not the accents, the COMPREHENSION. They are educated by stupid executives and their drones. The agents try, but they simply are not given the tools. And the first is oftentimes common sense!

     

    And let me remind you, with integrated graphics(which is the topic of this thread!), you don't have problems like that. You rarely update the drivers. You don't mess with settings and timings. And you don't have compatibility profiles to configure and set-up. Nor do you have to think about cooling with loud fans or waterblocks. And there are those monster 600watt power supplies. And I didn’t even mention memory resonances and timings, let alone bios updates. C’mon you system architects let us make an elegant solution that works.. Not these hackjobs with design philosophies dating back to the 80’s and 90’s. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have a compatibility baseline dating back that long, but, let’s not get extreme with it. Who needs a $500 card that will be considered a $99 mainstream offering in 1 year’s time. Ok, maybe 2 at most. And who wants to pay $500 for something which in year you will be told is garbage and is not even being made anymore.

     

    Well, the marketing drones will make you feel good about buying something right now as long as it’s new. Then next year they will tell you what you have is bad, and you have to buy something new again. I see this all the time with graphics card junkies. All in the pursuit of an 5 fps. Saaaadddd.

     

    The real trend, is to start moving away from the graphics chip being on a card located 5 inches away from the cpu. Now we are bringing it closer to the cpu both physically and in the way data flows back and forth between the cpu/gpu. And another thing I like is that the design of cpus are changing enough to where that they will have enough cores to handle the gpu functionality. That begins with DirectX 11, where the software api will pick up anything the graphics card can’t handle. In fact, the api would render directly to the framebuffer if there wasn’t even as much as a BLT operation available on the gpu!! So we see (and those infamous review sites agree) that gpu hardware is limiting the progression of ideas. So M$ is moving the pipeline back under cpu control. And now they’re talking about directx-12?? Uhm folks, let’s fix the problems with dx9 and 10 first..

     

    And what about the Apple II series of computers?? Those did not have graphics chips at all? The 6502 cpu just put bits in the main memory, from which a timer circuit read out directly to an rf modulator/tv .. Barely the most basic of ramdacs!! If that at all.

     

    Doesn’t anyone see the wastefulness of external graphics cards compared to integrated graphics yet ??

     

    I wanna morph this thread into “Wastefulness of the internet” or “Forgotten promises by technology.”

  17. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    The systems that did it for me was the VCS, Intellivision, Astrocade, O2, C-64, Vic-20, Atari 400/800 and last but no least, the Apple ][+, then when I blew it up, a //e. I had parents that ran into money for a short amount of time, so I took advantage as best as I could. But I do not act rich or snobby. Anyways,

     

    Now, special hardware also got me all orgasmic, was an 810 disk drive, Pointmaster Joystick (I rolled defender on the 800 with that!), A MicroModem ][, an AppleCat with 212 board, a small circuit card that let me hook the clicking speaker on the Apple ][+ to a 500 watt stereo, A cassette interface cable.

     

    Special software that riled me up!

    A400/800

    Star Raiders

    Basic

    Assembler / Editor

    BallBlazer

    Shamus

    Necromancer

    Defender

    Dos 2.5

     

    Apple II

    Gorgon

    Track attack

    Snake Byte

    Horizon V

    Zenith

    Neptune

    Wavy Navy

    Ascii Express (terminal software) (AE-line bbs)

    Some sort of magical terminal program that could send files WHILE you chatted with the k-kalico-kewl whearz d00d sysop on the other end!

    A2-FS1

    Space Adventure

    StarBlazer

    CatSend

    Fire Organ

    Networks BBS

    And way too many more to mention here.

     

    PC

    Tyhpoon 2001

    X-plane

    Windows Explorer file system

    NTFS

    MS Outlook

    DosBox and Doom

    Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator

    MSS

    classic gaming emulators

     

    2600 vcs

    Surround

    Combat

    Hangman

    SlotRacers

    Human Cannonball

    Circus Atari

    Video Chess

    Indy 500

    Missile command

    Video pinball

    Phoenix

    SlotMachine / Casino

    Supercharger

    Miniature Golf

    Basic Programming

    StarShip

    Superman

    Air Sea Battle

    SkyDiver

    MazeCraze

    Oscar's trash race

     

    Yes, each one of those games was exciting beyond belief. And a rainstorm outside made them even *MORE* cool.

     

    I had not had those magical feelings till I got my first 3D accelerator card for the PC platform back in 96 or 97, A Riva-128, and then 3Dfx VOODOO-2, and then my notebook (with integrated graphics!) Can you imagine that a memory controller WITH a graphics processor built onto the same chip, My head was spinning and all itchy. Every try to scratch the inside of your brain? But mediocrity was fast to follow. Totall lameness with the pc platform ensude for many more years.

     

    The biggest blast of recent times was when Mike Cuddy came out with the Gyruss music emulator. Then came M.A.M.E. in its first incarnation of DASarcde - Or Dasa for short. This was around the turn of the century. The joy and fun of building an emulation collection was not intense since it was spread out over many years. A spurt here, a spurt there.. Emulation was at hand, finally! And it has grown over a long period, punctuated with spikes everytime I'd add a new rom or something.

     

    There was this huge dry spell where I had not been excited by gaming hardware, and that was from 1987 to 1997. And then another dry spell hit till just about now, until emulation got into in full swing. I mean it's totally kickass to have hundreds of arcade and home system games in such a tiny package. (with integrated graphics).

     

     

    Absolutely thrilling I tell you! Gotta go play. Ta-Ta!

  18. Posted

    I think it's great that they recycle old titles and themes. As it allows for the younger generation and 5 and 10 year olds to experience what we experienced when we first saw Sonic and Mario and tmnt. Though I despise all those titles. I'm from the 2600 & intellivision generation.

     

    And you know what? It's great to see the 5 year old take an interest in 2600 emulation. They're just as interested in it because it's new. And of course, the graphics suck compared to today, but that matters not. It's the gameplay and they were transfixed, just like me when I first got a 2600 in the winter of the mid/late 70's.. Something new that had never been done before.

     

    Today, its ps1 ps2 ps3 wii exa-box-360 and whatever else. Same old same old.

     

    I think it's that since we do not associate the "never-been-done-before" aspect with a ps3, we tend to think it ho-hum. And we confuse the "never-been-done" aura of the 2600 with what we have today; Thereby making the 2600 look like the best of the best!! ..Despite it's pissflipper graphics.. Did that make sense?

     

    Game on!

  21. Posted

    You are right, pacman was *not* a labor of love by any means.. ET?? well there is a certain mystique about that game that makes me *want* to play it, but then I somehow turn it off after a few minutes. Back to Phoenix or Slot Racers or Surround!! ha!

     

    Though the amount of shovelware seemed high back then, just look at all garbage advertising on the internet and modern media these days. Its far far worse now.

  22. Posted

    This ain't meant to be a flamewar, though anyone is welcome to turn it into one. They can get amusing from time to time, a good laugh.

     

    Well, aside from that someone explain why intel is taking such a radical approach to graphics and gaming? Are they doing it to compete? Or do they think they can change the world with Laughabee? Or is it Larrabee? Just imagine all that excess bandwidth and having hundreds of pentium III class cores dynamically reallocatable on a frame-by-frame basis.. All this running at thousands of mhz. And being integrated into the cpu core, where does that leave nvidia? Will we need graphics cards? Afterall, the soundcard market is drying up. More sound is on-board than on a separate card these days. Took some time, but it happened.

     

    Well it's all fun and good times, aint it?

  24. Posted

    True, yes, it *is* common more so nowadays than ever, to fool the consuming public into buying something. Especially when fads and trends are hyped to high heaven. Yeh what's the deal with HD, everything is HD today. wtf? And it was refreshing to just recently buy a backup hard disk unit that did *N*O*T* have a blue led on it. Blue led's are another pet peeve of mine. They're too prevalent nowadays and the wow factor definite burned out. Well, the psychology of advertisting is getting better and better by the year. And the dumbing down of society is progressing according to whomever is doing that. But, I digress..

     

    Anyways, I should have stated in my first post that generally integrated graphics chips (laptops) do indeed lag behind their 'desktop' counterparts by about 3 - 4 years. That's my general observation. I'm talking mainstream offerings. But you gain a lot of efficiency and stability by working with slightly older technology that has matured and gone through the test of time. Not that I don't approve of that sort of activity.. I hacked in USB ports, with buffers, into my old 486 via the ISA bus. For fun, not for practicality. Most overclockers do it for practicality, that is the wrong reason.

     

    I am a 3dfx fan too. I still have my 6000, I have not played with it recently and the only 'mod' I did to it was put some good solid power supply connectors on it. Well.. I am so glad Nvidia bought them out years back, so they could take the technology (and engineers) to market the way it should be. BUT, and this is a big issue. GPU's are going to see a big drop in sales once Larrabee goes mainstream. Nvidia is going to need to redine their whole product focus.

     

    Overclocking, imho, is just a fanboy thing to make their pride swell, you know, the uh-leat pnwr boyz & haxorzs and whatnot. Overclocking severely limits reliability. When you balance the 'risk' vs. added speed, it never works out. You will pay through extra power consumption, or more noise, or less stability. That I can assure you of.

     

    Another thing, I'm not aware of any graphics boards today or even in recent times that are made to be upgraded with additional memory. Perhaps through a lot of work and soldering. Hacking. Yes, perhaps. But the time and money you spend on getting the parts and materials and time to do it all. Dammnn, just work an extra hour OT and get a whole new board!

  25. Posted

    All this talk about cooling schmooling and minutae and hemming and hawwing over details.. All that crap goes away when you get a system with integrated graphics. I also believe that a system should be quiet enough and require only one fan that can be turned on an off by the system as needed. Or perhaps no fans. Most of the m0dderz and gaymerz think they pwn the world with all these blue-led lighted cases with 8 fans screaming. Not to mention water kewling and all that excess 'gear' used to overclock stuff for an extra 5 fps on a game already blasting along at 100+fps. There is absolutely no need to waste power like that. And in the end, all it does is make a system unstable. Who cares if it runs crysis or prime'95 for hours on end. I want that to work, in silence, for days and weeks on end!!

     

    So, that being said. A graphics card isn't that important for 8-bit home computers and games emulation; Stella, Intellivision, Atari 400/800, Amiga, C-64, Astrocade, CoCo, Apple //e .. etc..etc.. And even with M.A.M.E. for the arcades it isn't a big deal. All those things will be limited by your cpu and to a lesser extent memory bus structure. Hell, those things were limited by an i486 cpu in my first pc, with ISA bus! All but the absolute worst graphics cards will serve you just fine.

     

    I have an old Pentium-M Centrino with Intel integrated graphics (855GM series) and all my emulation stuff works absolutely perfectly. The nice thing about integrated graphics is that the drivers are far far more stable than add-in cards. I like that. And they run cool. Only downfall in the integrated solutions are a little behind the performance curve. But, that is getting better. And when I say integrated graphics, I mean that the graphics core resides either on the memory controller northbridge chip, or the upcoming Larabee architechture from intel. This puts the graphics chip in direct communitcation with the cpu. And *that*, folks is going to be the best performing gpu ever.. Why? You'll have massive bandwidth for the framebuffer. I have seen so many capable discrete graphics chips work well, up to the point of the GPU having to go off-board, over the system bus, to get textures. That's when things slow down.

     

    Which brings me to this point: Today's games have good graphics but absolutely suck donkey when it comes to gameplay. We are throwing money at advertising and all sorts of wasteful useless NON-INTERACTIVE content in games that it's pathetic beyong belief. All the cut-scenes, all the loading time wasted on blahoo-ray discs. The annoying pauses. Needlessly complex storylines. Steep learning curves for what amounts to little more than a 3-D shoot-em-up. Wouldn't you rather play Slot Racers or Missile Command on the 2600??

     

    If you want to see a most genuinely steep and rewarding curve in a pc-game or simulation, check out orbitersim.com , it's all freeware too. Or perhaps something like flight simulator. Either way, most folks won't be able to master the Orbiter 'game' without cheating or violating a lot of the procdures. Ahh well..

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