frogstar_robot
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Posts posted by frogstar_robot
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At least by having something like this, we have another item to bring to the table in case Apple IIGS fans start claiming they have the best 8-bit machine. I mean if we remove the restriction of being in the 8-bit Era, then there's plenty of time to come up with new hardware anytime you want.If combined with a 65816 upgrade then we'll have an "Atari IIGS". The resemblance would get even stronger if the ECI/PBI were brought out to an expansion backplane.
Course then everybody will have to indulge a 4000+ thread with the C-64 SuperCPU fanboys.......
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I don't get it. Both systems were black... Are you saying Coleco's Adam lost because it was white?
A buddy of mine had one. The ADAM for sure was a temperamental kludge-monster but we played the hell out of Super Buck Rogers Planet Of Zoom. The tape versions of many games had more and extended levels and extra animations. The cartridge version of Buck Rogers falls pretty flat for me since I played so much of the tape version. The ADAM also had a Donkey Kong with the missing 4th level (though my buddy didn't have that). I had a lot of fun on that machine.
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Thank you for the information
I guess I'm out of luck
I already updated to System Menu 4.0 ( at least whatever the last update was that let you store VC games on the SD card... )I'll have to wait for the next work-around.
Happy news. An exploit has been designed to replace the Zelda exploit. You'll need an SDHC card though:
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hardware tricks should be working with and explaining to the peeps that program these emulators how to incorporate these new hardware effects/tricks into these emulatorsThat really isn't the right way to think about it. New effects just expose flaws in the emulation. All these years later and the real hardware is still a black box to some extent and thanks to the emergent effects that is probably true even for the people who designed it. When an effect doesn't work in emulation but does on real hardware then it isn't a matter of incorporating the effect into the emulation. It is the hardware behavior the effect relys on that needs to be emulated.
Case in point, I've heard of an ST demo that checks for emulation and refuses to run in emulation. No arms race between emu coders and demo coders is required. Code running in an emulator shouldn't be able to detect that so all these demo coders have done is point out a hardware behavior that needs to be simulated.
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I think the reason people have been willing to pay more for netbooks than the original EEE hype indicated was to get that extra horsepower and screen real estate that Windows demands.Ding! Ding! Ding! And that is what is causing the price and specs of the things to be bloated.
As I say, there is nothing wrong with a new class of small Windows machines but small Windows machines aren't going to fulfill the original promise of netbooks anytime soon. It doesn't matter if the options of a cheap basically disposable device are limited or not. Just pay a hundred or two more for one of the misnamed subnotebooks that are out now.
If I have something that will go 7 or 8 hours on a battery, can access the web, most documents and media, and can maybe do an additional few tasks and I can get all this at a throwaway price then I really won't care if it can run Greeting Card Frobster XP Edition or not. The ARM vendors also seem smarter about the way they are being marketed. Marketed correctly, they won't have meet "small XP computer" expectations. They'll be sold for what they are and more can always be paid if the small x86 machine is what is truly wanted. Nobody expects to run XP on a smartphone so nobody should on these either. It is a matter of marketing them right.
And understand that nobody making Windows machines wants to see such a device anywhere near a $100 price point. MS doesn't and the likes of Dell and Lenovo don't either. It would force an unwelcome adjustment to their business models. So we pretty much are only going to see such things from new vendors that aren't hitched to those models.
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The next phase of netbooks are going to have much more powerful graphics systems. They should be able to handle 1080P without breaking a sweat, and more classes of games, so they will be more viable as true desktop replacements. That's worth waiting for. However, we're also seeing a trend away from 9" displays and into 10" and larger displays. I prefer the 8.9" form-factor and hope that it hangs on until I pick one up.When talking about a machine like that I don't even see much point in calling it a "netbook". It is just a "laptop" with a smaller screen and keyboard. I'm even seeing things called "netbooks" with mechanical hard drives. At some point the original idea of an inexpensive focused machine for web, mail, and light productivity got hijacked and harnessed to the expectations for already existing subnotebooks. Now a small Win7 or XP machine that goes for $400+ is all well and good but that isn't what I think when I hear "netbook".
What I was hoping to see by now when the first EEE PCs came out was something at a <$200 pricepoint in a blister pack at Wal-Mart and eventually I'd like to see such focused devices around a $100 pricepoint but the established x86 laptop makers are scared to death of it and aren't going to give us that. Just see the recent blather from Lenovo's president.
Thankfully, new vendors not tied to that ecosystem are coming out with ARM based devices at much lower pricepoints. These will not be slaved to the Win32 ecosystem and so we'll hopefully get the truly new category of device I was excited about when netbooks first came on the market. Such devices won't be "the ultimate emulation platform" but then they were never intended to be though they'll handle things like Stella just fine. And we'll probably have to coin yet another new term "webbook" say for them since "netbooks" are basically interchangeable with subnotebooks now.
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The second one (pencils2.xex) is about Vscroll trick (mentioned in the same thread, probably not implemented in your emulator yet) where ANTIC doesn't fetch any data and repeats only from it's internal cache and it should look like in Atari800Win (the same as real atari, tested).Atari++ doesn't appear to render pencils2.xex correctly either.
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But they made a mistake by building the chip into the Atari. The POKEY Chip was designed for 1-1.3MHz, not for 1.79MHz. It caused losing a whole octave at the 8-bit pitch resolution, or, as many tunes showed, they have to sound always 1 octave too high by the higher resulting frequency.If you google a bit, you'll find some synth projects based around POKEY. Nothing like what is around SID but a few. I think it would be interesting to be able to feed a POKEY or maybe several POKEYs an adjustable clock. I suspect it might not work right when the chip is outputting sound but you could definitely keep the thing in a lot better tune; at least one could clock the POKEY where it will be most accurate for the notes demanded of it. The adjustable clock might even be a nice mod for an A8 but it would have to be a separate chip dedicated to sound generation as the IO functions wouldn't take kindly to having their clock diddled.
It also seems to me that even the simplest of those projects are putting quite a bit of logic around the POKEY. It is a good and interesting device but it really isn't a synth-on-a-chip the way SID is. That isn't always bad but some CPU of some sort is always going to be needed to get the best out of it.
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Who said it needed to sound like an arcade game?No one did but it is a plus when porting an arcade title. I'll give the SID lots of points for making music that sounds like it came from an analog synth. But I do generally believe the SID slightly weak for sound effects as opposed to musical sounds. The reverse is generally true of POKEY.
And Atari has used upwards of four of them in arcade cabs but POKEY is a slightly different animal when driven by a processor with more cycles to burn than a 6502 running at 1.79Mhz. I was amazed to find out that much of what I heard from many Atari cabs was the same chip in an A8.
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I dont know if this may help if the HBC has to already been installed or not but one of the mods on WiiBrew's forums post this on his bloghttp://arikadosblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/r...annel-with.html
I have HBC installed and may update to 4.0 from 3.4 but was waiting to see how much was/is disabled with the update I may update and just live with what comes with it
That won't help unless the HBC had been installed at some point prior to upgrading to 4.0 or the Wii has had some otherwise dodgy hacks installed prior to upgrading the System Menu.
When a channel is installed and this includes the HBC, a "ticket" is left in the Wii's onboard flash. These tickets are why you can re-download deleted content from Wii Shop without paying again. The procedure you quote allows re-installation of the HBC if you deleted either before or after going to Menu 4.0. It will NOT facilitate a new install of HBC.
There is a new exploit called Bootmii coming out soon that will replace both the HBC and the Zelda exploit. It is working privately for the developers and I understand they are working on finishing touches to make the exploit as smoothly working and universal as possible.
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I dont have the Homebrew channel and Homebrew Browser for bad stuff pirating etc but like some of the apps and games the homebrew developers have come up with including Stella for the Wii
Unless emulators count as "bad stuff pirating" the Homebrew Channel and Browser don't directly facilitate piracy of Wii titles. The authors of the Homebrew Channel and the folks at wiibrew.org are pro homebrew and very antipiracy.
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Is there any other way to get these loaded besides with the Zelda game? I'd like to try Stella and ProSystem if there is.Thanks!
Bob
What you want to do is install The Homebrew Channel.
You have to use the Zelda exploit to get it installed but once installed you only need to choose The Homebrew Channel in the Wii menu to run the homebrew installed on an SD card. I also recommend The Homebrew Browser once the HBC has been installed. You can install and update the homebrew on the SD card with the Browser.
Make an apps directory on the root of the SD card. Most homebrew expects to run from it's own directory in apps. Individual programs tend to create settings files and directories in the root of the SD card when run for the first time. Don't change the name of unpacked app directories. Homebrew tends to set to run from a coded path like (SD root)/apps/wii2600.
Raz0red's stuff is installable with the Browser but it can take a week or two to show up. The impatient can just drop new homebrew in /apps.
Do NOT upgrade to System Menu 4.0. System Menu 4.0 has a fix for the Zelda exploit. You CAN upgrade to Menu 4.0 once the HomeBrew Channel is installed. Menu 4.0 also breaks DVDx if you want to run Homebrew or access media files on DVD.
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[Sorry about that - it won't be back on the old place since I left Berlin since a while ago, and the math department there is no longer able to serve my website. Unfortunately, the new department where I'm working - at the Computing Center in Stuttgart - does not allow private webspaces for employees, so I'm looking into another way of hosting it. Any ideas welcome.
You could just throw it on Sourceforge. You don't have to use their CVS or Subversion repositories. It would work well enough to download the odd tarball now and again.
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@Keetah:Glad to help. I know the downloads are huge, but so's what they've done to Duke3D; hardware acceleration, new .ogg music, high resolution textures, 3D models to replace old 2D enemy sprites ... the sheer time and effort put into it is mind boggling. Well worth the download for any Duke3D fan.
And more productive than the now-defunct 3DRealms team I might add. I think they're going to call it Duke Nukem NeverEver now.
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I think the best approach to an A8 graphics program would be one that builds a kernel as you draw using a "rip-up and retry" approach to achieving the requested colors. It could also allow a line to be locked if the user wanted to enter custom code.That would be awesome. Allow for the direct manipulation of DLIs and PMGs by more advanced users, but let non-techs have some fun too.
It didn't do it automatically but the RAMbrandt drawing program did let you set DLIs with the cursor. You set where it started, ended, and the color. I always thought of them working like colored cellophane sheets that you place over the graphics background. RAMbrandt was pretty cool for an eighties graphics software but it didn't support the software modes in use now nor did it allow for using PMGs as enhancements.
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Yeah but again, not meaning this as A8vsC64. I'd like to see something like this for the A8 graphics modes. The Wiki is pretty good but seems a little lacking, especially for the new modes.The following on Wikipedia covers some of the software-driven modes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-driv...8-bit_computers
I took the following straight from the A8 FAQ. Perhaps someone knowledgeable can talk about things like GPRIOR.
GRAPHICS MODES:
ANTIC GTIA CIO/BASIC Display Resolution Number of
Mode # Mode # Graphics # Type (full screen) Colors/Hues
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2 0 Char 40 x 24 1 *
3 - Char 40 x 19 1 *
4 12 ++ Char 40 x 24 5
5 13 ++ Char 40 x 12 5
6 1 Char 20 x 24 5
7 2 Char 20 x 12 5
8 3 Map 40 x 24 4
9 4 Map 80 x 48 2
A 5 Map 80 x 48 4
B 6 Map 160 x 96 2
C 14 ++ Map 160 x 192 2
D 7 Map 160 x 96 4
E 15 ++ Map 160 x 192 4
F 8 Map 320 x 192 1 *
+F 1 9 Map 80 x 192 1 **
+F 2 10 Map 80 x 192 9
+F 3 11 Map 80 x 192 16 ***
* 1 Hue, 2 Luminances
** 1 Hue, 16 Luminances (GTIA); or, 1 Hue, 8 Luminances (FGTIA)
*** 16 Hues, 1 Luminance
+ require the GTIA/FGTIA chip. (1979-1981 400/800's shipped with CTIA.)
++ Not available via the BASIC GRAPHICS command in 400/800 version of OS.
(See a separate section in this FAQ list for a discussion of the "missing"
ANTIC Modes 0 and 1.)
GRAPHICS INDIRECTION (COLOR REGISTERS AND CHARACTER SETS):
Nine color registers are available. Each color register holds any of 16
luminances x 16 hues = 256 colors. (Four registers are for player-missile
graphics.
Character sets of 128 8x8 characters, each with a normal and an inverse
video incarnation, are totally redefinable.
PLAYER-MISSILE GRAPHICS: (byte height and OR corrections from Piotr Fusik)
Four 8-bit wide, 120 or 240 byte high single color players, and four
2-bit wide, 120 or 240 byte high single color missiles are available.
A mode to combine the 4 missiles into a 5th 8-bit wide player is also
available, as is a mode to OR colors or blacken out colors when players
overlap (good for making three colors out of two players!) Players
and missiles have adjustable priority and collision detection.
DISPLAY LIST INTERRUPTS (DLI's):
Screen modes can be mixed (by lines) down the screen using the Display
List - a program which is executed by the ANTIC graphics chip every
screen refresh:
All other screen attributes (color, player/missile horizontal position,
screen width, player/missile/playfield priority, etc.) can be adjusted
at any point down the screen via DLI's.
And a bit more
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I'd be interested in explanations of common software modes like MCI, FLI, SH and so-forth which are analogous to things like Super IRG, HIP, RIP, and so-forth on the A8. And what kind of tricks are available to make the hardware do some things it shouldn't be able to do "on paper".
It would also be interesting to know what tradeoffs those involve in terms of CPU usage, flicker, placement limitation and so-forth. And what are the best tools on PCs and the C-64 itself to create the screens.
Another good side topic is usage of sprites to enhance screens or using sprites as a graphics layer.
And I too would prefer to read about all this without asides on the subject of A8 superiority. It is interesting stuff in and of itself and any such should go to the monster thread reserved for it.
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How do you get 160x192 out of these? Alternate x position of frames for half a pixel ?My gut feeling is just telling me that this is tooo complicated...
That takes advantage of a bug that is present in all known GTIA chips. Mode 10 screens are positioned horizontally off by half a color clock. When alternated with frames drawn in either of the other two GTIA modes, you get an apparant 160x192 screen. The disadvantage is a bit of flicker and a rake effect on the right and left sides.
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It can do nice stills but it's going to use up a lot of its CPU doing collision detection, scrolling, zooming, etc. Perhaps, color cycling may help it out to faster 60 fps animation.I think that it obviously does so sometimes looking at those movies I linked. Nonetheless, they show the IIGS doing fast, colorful, hi-res games. That the A8 has some hardware to help with things the IIGS has do with CPU doesn't take away that in general the IIGS is a higher spec machine than the A8 or C64. I would expect no less from a machine engineered to straddle the 8/16 bit divide. My casual googling also shows that accelerator cards were somewhat mainstream to add faster CPUs and memory to these machines. A IIGS with 4MB RAM and a 10 or even 8MHz cpu will pretty much have the CPU to more than make up for specialized gaming hardware. The stock machines appear fairly capable as is.
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You might also want to look at Bochs (bochs.sourceforge.net) now that it's gone opensource; more an x86 (+hardware) emulator than DOS specifically, but it would provide you with a tweakable virtual PC.Bochs is more for academic exploration of architecture internals. It is very much on the slow side for actually running software. Something like VMWare, VirtualBox, or QEMU is a better choice if going that route. The path of least resistance is DOSBox as others have mentioned though I'd look for modern ports of the game or it's engine before resorting to emulation.
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It's not even that graphically powerful. It does not have blitter chip nor sprites nor any lower resolution modes. They all have to be done in software. Atari 8-bit has sprites and can do hardware-assisted zooming, scrolling, etc. And IIgs was definitely during 16-bit era, but even then it fails to accomplish many things equivalent to an Atari 8-bit.I wouldn't have been all that sorry to have one back in the day. It may not be a Miner-style architecture but it is by no means weak in comparison to an A8 or a C-64:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBWwmnMx6M...feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnlNEg9KhaY...feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE8fS58UFi8...feature=related
The bright spot with this machine is that Ensoniq sound chip. It has no problem drawing nicer stills than anything a non-VBXE A8 or Commy is going to do and appears to have enough CPU grunt to at least hold it's own gaming.
It is a nice machine but came out when all the hype was on 16-bit machines and it suffers from "C-128 Syndrome" where very little software targets the expanded features.
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I died the first time I had unprotected sex in Leisure Suit Larry:
I also liked it when Roger Wilco's unlucky number comes up on the slots in Space Quest. (about 3:25 in)
"You're f***ed homeboy!"
I do believe the remake cleaned it up a bit. I think the old EGA version didn't say "You Lose".
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Is there a "better" mode or a trick that can show more colors in one line (but with the same resolution - 80 pixels in line is to ugly... )me resolution - 80 pixels in line is to ugly... )
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/sife/
That is a charset editor for "SuperIRG" mode. This mode is a relatively low-demand software charmode that allows 10 colors per line without resorting to DLIs. It uses a VBI to switch between two "graphics 12" IRG charmode screens.
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Cleaning up the town!! I say either do what Ian has done or get rid of all the crap.I know they gutted them and must make room but that still pains me to see. That's like watching a Mach III Mustang put in a crusher.
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Stella for the Wii
in Emulation
Posted
I suggest using Bannerbomb to install Hackmii. Hackmii can in turn install the Homebrew Channel. Then you won't have to keep using the exploit. I run Wii2600 through HBC and don't have such problems.