rbairos

Its not bad for long movies, as the speed accelerates. A two hour movie gets to the end in a couple minutes I believe.

Me too. Fingers crossed. I'll rebuild the test ASM file, and maybe people with Harmony or Plus , or Uno Carts can try it on their setups this weekend. Should have thought of that earlier.

This is the first time the movie carts been tested on a PAL Atari, and I believe its a PAL TV as well. I think he'll be able to find another setup to test. By fundamental problem, you mean with the TIA or with the kernel? I think I'll dig up the old kernel test code, then maybe we could try it on a Harmony cart or something, to make sure the kernel is sound at least.

I've thought about it alot. Originally it was a non-starter as the 64MIPs microcontroller wouldn't have the cycles. But even now with 100MHz, there's a big benefit to knowing each frame is at a fixed position. Makes shuttling easier. Technically Im using around 2.5K per field, but I rounded that up to 4K thinking it might be easier on the SDCard access. I might end up using a RLE though in the future if I move to a higher definition graphics system.

And here's 1 second worth of the title screen. title.zip

Here's the NTSC output with VDELP1=0. Very close, but not 100% sure it's a match. Maybe.

Thanks so much James!

Tester will test more in the upcoming days, but I can ask. Think things are mostly in storage. I'll try to reconstitute the theatre image into a file again. Might take me a little bit. It's all separated C byte arrays at the moment, in the firmware code. Tonight I'll write #0 to VDELP1 in a moviecart and take a photo of the title screen as well.

Sneaky standard! But settable on the MovieCart encoder by users. I could add it as a default though. Interesting, I should get you an MVC of the theatre title screen image, then we would know for certain. The card has a clock, but only to drive the microcontroller that monitors the address/data bus. Maybe the changes aren't as clean as it needs. Don't follow. When you disable VDELP1, you're not seeing what you expect?

So PAL-60. That's basically just outputting fewer lines then? Yah, I should dig up the original ASM format. Thought the timing might be traceable on the stella debugger. Re: Different CPU frequency. Thought about it, but not sure where it may apply. The pixel clock isn't directly tied to the CPU clock in PAL systems from my understanding? Maybe there's some edge case that falls the wrong way in this setup. That would surprise me though. If anything, the microcontroller should have a little more time to update each pixel then? Thanks, Rob

I'll PM you. Thanks.

@Thomas Jentzsch : Don't original PAL Atari's output PAL-50 though? An early implementation is in stella. The code is very low-level, but it was mirrored around V1 hardware at the time: https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/blob/master/src/emucore/CartMVC.cxx (For comparison, here's the same kernel implemented in V2: https://github.com/lodefmode/moviecart/blob/main/firmware/core.c ) Strange thing is above kernel plays these PAL encoded examlpes fine on unreleased stella: https://github.com/lodefmode/moviecart/tree/main/examples Thanks.

Sept 16 2023 I extended the format to specify overscan, vsync etc to support PAL https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/commit/b2004d0c496bbc8869439fbfd0fce16dcff3a328 It's been merged, but no compiled release has been put out yet.

So can anyone describe *why* some CPUs fail to load Atari 2600 carts at the hardware level? I have zero experience past the 2600. Are the clock timing seqeuences different or something? If I'm being honest, the response since posting has been somewhat overwhelming, so instead of having a perfect general solution, I think round 1 may have to be limited to : NTSC Only Atari 2600 / Coleco-Adapter / modded FB2 Maybe a small shipment to 10 AA users (from the original ordered list I kept), who can also give feedback if the above case fails. Then if that goes well, more of the above, while I get my hands on a 7800 and/or PAL system to attach a digital scope to, to figure out what's happening. Thoughts? PS. Still open to any quick firmware fixes that would address this.

I started a separate thread for PAL artifacts:

Hey Everybody. Thought I'd start a new thread for this specific topic. So I've gotten someone to help test MovieCart on PAL, and we found a problem right away: The kernel doesn't seem to be working. You can see the correct vs incorrect screen shots below. The 'i' column in movie is duplicated "Miovie" Granted, this startup screen is still NTSC format: width: 80 height: 192 vsync: 3 blank: 37 overscan: 30 total lines: 262 I would expect this to roll, but not mix up the kernel like that. I do use the undocumented 8-bit sprite shift, and I assume this works on PAL ant NTSC, since it works on Stella and Gopher? It's still the same horizontal number of pixels per line right? The cart firmware runs at the same speed, updating the data bus on address changes as before. It doesn't change its timing. The only provisions I make for PAL are all in the MVC file: width: 80 height: 242 vsync: 3 blank: 37 overscan: 30 Total Lines: 312 (Plus I use a different color palette and write out the frames to the file every 25th vs 30th of a second). Any idea what I may be overlooking? Worst case, I go out and get a PAL Atari, and find a way to watch it on LCD. Thanks very much.

John if you leave it running long enough, do you start to hear the audio of the movie? or is it completely glitched state. Does fire-button pause it etc?

Yes. I tested it on a friends and it worked as expected. The parts I worry most about are that undocumented 8-pixel shift left, but seems to work so far. (EDIT: Also works on a modded Flashback2 as I used it during development mostly, so avoided the stuck A12 line entirely).

That's awesome. Ive found about 3 little articles so far. Everyone assumes its sold out, but reality nobody has the kit yet, except the 2 or 3 people I've just mailed it to a few days ago. Fingers crossed!

So, I've made about 20, from which I made a few movies for myself, and sent out a couple for testing. I've drop-shipped components for another 50, but want to hear back from the testing before having those assembled (JLCPCB), in case it needs any revisions (fingers crossed). The waitlist on tindie has really started growing fast (from my little pov), but I have no idea what percentage of those will translate to purchase orders once I put up inventory. After that it should be pretty straight forward. I basically just order stuff, have it assembled and sent to me. Then its a matter of me burning the firmware, prepping the sdcard, and boxing+labels. I did invest in a little thermal shipping label to speed things up! It's been fun (so far). But I will definitely post right here the date+time I plan on making the 60 units or so available on tindie. My bigges fear, is people will get their card and think 'man, this sucks'. I mean, it will, but hopefully people get a good feeling before hand by creating their own videos to watch emulated on Gopher (or later Stella), which doesn't require any hardware at all. Cheers

Yes, you can sign up for pre-order here: https://www.tindie.com/products/lodefmode/moviecart-atari-2600/ @sfish My plan is to have a couple of AA members finish testing them, then I'll make a batch of 50 avaiable, but first announce it ahead of time here on this forum. Cheers.

That's great. It may take a second to register individual stills without context, but Im sure it looks even better at 30fps motion with matching audio.

I would love to have shipped with some music videos, but that will be up to individuals to encode for copyright reasons. You'd have to string all the videos together in one mvc file as well, though I suppose that's in keeping with technology of the day. Vinyl records, 8 tracks, and cassettes all played multiple songs from start to finish. And thats the way we liked it!

I think the current stella is still one major build behind. Can you try on latest Gopher emulator? @grafixbmp Did you encode using recent toe file encode from the github? EDIT. Confirmed: Stella 6.7 released (fails) Stella 7.0 unreleased (works) Gopher 0.27 released (works) PM me the zipped mvc file and I can confirm.

I've only added Canada and US so far for shipping, but will add more custom shipping locations as people request. The only real difference between PAL and NTSC is the number of vertical lines I encode in the encoder. (and decode the original movie at 25 vs 30 fps), and use a different color palette. That seems too easy, but it seems to do the trick. I dont know if its actually been tested on a PAL atari yet. I'll try and find out. I think the moviecart moviecontroller should handle it okay, as the address line changes from the atari should be slightl slower if anything. Am I forgetting anything? Im hoping thats better tested in the upcoming reviews, before I ship them out.