[This doesn’t bode well for the AtariVox]

Awesome - I have missed Artie!

 

Now that the blog is borked, I’m hoping you will release all of the Artie strips in printed form at some point?

 

Chris

[Chetiry]

7 hours ago, root42 said:

Well, I was just ready to buy the cartridge, but: I can't! There is no 'Add to cart' button for Chetiry. Why? 

I think this means it is currently out of stock

 

Chris

[Chetiry]

It should also work on the Retron 77 console using the unofficial firmware (based on the latest Stella).

Chris

[Chetiry]

The Stella emulator was recently upgraded to support Chetiry bankswitching.   You can play the full game by downloading the latest Stella and using the chetiry_NTSC_STELLA.bin (or chetiry_PAL_STELLA.bin) image from this page:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/282280-chetiry-2600/

 

Note that you can't play Chetiry directly on the Harmony cartridge at this time.

Chris

[Minor enhancements]

I’m looking forward to the 1yr review of your model 3 - I’m interested to know what these cars are like for daily use.

 

Chris

[Minor C issue, any ideas?]

To use the approach that I am proposing, the workflow would be something like:

• Create a file containing the sprite data in the usual DASM format
• Run D00D over the data to optimize the layout
• Run a utility to convert the D00D output into C struct format (this would need to be written)
• #include the C struct containing the sprite data in your code

Chris

[Minor C issue, any ideas?]

The best way that I know to do this is the following:

 

1) Use D00D to optimize the data - assume the output is the following:

 

sprite1:
  .byte 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
sprite2:
  .byte 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
sprite3:
sprite4:
  .byte 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

2) Create a C structure to hold the data - unfortunately you do need to specify the length of each chunk of data (you could probaby write a utility to do this):

 

typedef struct {
  const unsigned char sprite1[5];
  const unsigned char sprite2[10];
  const unsigned char sprite3[0];
  const unsigned char sprite4[7];
} SPRITEDATA;

3) Initialize the structure with the sprite data (again this formatting could be done via a utility):

 

__attribute__((used))
__attribute__((packed))
const SPRITEDATA sprites = {
  .sprite1 = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5},
  .sprite2 = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10},
  .sprite4 = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
};

4) Now, you can reference the sprite data easily, e.g:

 

// Access the data directly
unsigned char x = sprites.sprite1[6];

// Access the data as an array (C doesn't do bounds checking, so this is actually accessing data in sprite2)
const unsigned char *s1 = sprites.sprite1;
unsigned char x = s1[6];

// Copy the sprite data to a queue
myMemcpy(_QUEUE, (unsigned char*)s1, 16);

// For bonus points you can also access the data as an offset from the beginning of the struct (GCC only)
#define offsetof(type, member)  __builtin_offsetof (type, member)
unsigned char *spritedata = (unsigned char *)&sprites;
unsigned char y = spritedata[offsetof(SPRITEDATA, sprite4) + 3];

// The offsets can also be held in a short array to save memory (over pointers):
const unsigned short offsets[] = 
{offsetof(SPRITEDATA, sprite1),
 offsetof(SPRITEDATA, sprite2),
 offsetof(SPRITEDATA, sprite3),
 offsetof(SPRITEDATA, sprite4)};

[Homebreviews - part 42: Puzzle Pandemonium]

Thanks Nathan - nice review - I don’t think it occurred to me to add support for the genesis controller to Chetiry at the time - would probably be straightforward ...

 

Chris

[Homebreviews - part 41: Star Castle Showdown]

Thanks for the reviews - I’ve been waiting years to read this

 

Chris

[Homebreviews - part 40: Mini-Game Madness]

As an aside, I thought about doing a series of strips where Artie reviews 2600 games, but I haven't quite figured out how to make it work.

 

Artie can be rather blunt - not sure that would go down well with some of the more fragile members!

 

Maybe just an Artie recommends series ...

 

Does Artie actually play the games himself though?

 

Chris

[Homebreviews - part 40: Mini-Game Madness]

Yars' Revenge wins.

 

This feels like an Artie cartoon:

1) I was going to compare the two star castles

2) you know, the good one and the erm other one

3) but then I realised they were both ripping off Yars’ Revenge

4) So I just played that instead ...

 

[Homebreviews - part 40: Mini-Game Madness]

Can’t wait for the Star Castle showdown (though I suspect I know the outcome)!

[Another Pleasant Valley To-do List]

I'd like to see Project Bruce come back at some point. Of course if you want to work on it, I'd be happy to help. But the potential for a C&D on that is pretty high, which is why I haven't been doing anything with it.

 

I thought bus stuffing had been sorted out by ZackAttack.

 

The bus stuffing fix by ZackAttack is quite difficult to use - not really possible with the BUS driver that I previously wrote. I'm still hoping for a tweak to the Harmony hardware, or that the new UnoCart 2600, will make this unnecessary ...

 

Chris

[Homebreviews - part 39: Hack Attack]

Awesome - great to see the return of these reviews (though I won't be rushing to play any of these anytime soon!)

 

Chris

[Another Pleasant Valley To-do List]

I see that Project Bruce has been removed from the list - this is still something that I would like to do one day, and should be much easier using CDF.

 

It doesn’t look like the bus stuffing issues will be resolved any time soon, so Black Squirrell is postponed indefinitely.

 

I’m looking forward to the restart of your high quality home brew reviews!

 

Chris

[Yet even more further still behind]

I got draconian this week also. I’m still waiting for your review comparing the two versions of star castle

 

Chris

[The Best Assembly Computer]

A good text editor is all you need for asm - sublime, atom, or textmate and you are good to go ...

[Release Candidate]

Nice work on getting the RC completed. I'll compile it myself later, but how many bytes are still free, and were you able to fit in all the samples?

 

Chris

[Disappointed]

Please don't stop working on your homebrews! CDF will make it possible to do some amazing things. Is it possible that the tight PRGE deadline is sucking the fun out of it? Perhaps you should consider pushing the release after the show to give more time to finish things off?

 

Chris

[major performance improvement]

Can you explain a bit about how the XOR algorithm works as I'm struggling to follow it from the code? I think you start with a base station image in RAM, then draw the pods into a second RAM buffer, then XOR the second buffer into the base station image. I'm curious why the second buffer is required? Could you simply draw the pods on top of the base image, or xor them directly onto the base image without the buffer?

 

Chris

[Sector Editor]

You should change the CUSTOMNAME in the Makefile from testarm to draco or similar

 

(though don't use draconian or it will collide with the 2600 bin file) ...

 

Chris

[Logo revised]

The pictures on the news are unbelievable. I hope you continue to stay safe and that things improve soon. Some things are more important than Atari.

 

Chris

[Testing]

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/248199-my-pet-project-mmdc-retro-player/

 

 

[Logo downsized]

It is a shame that you had to drop the large Draconian logo. I wonder if it would have been possible to compress the logo data better (e.g. RLL encoding) and decompress it directly into the 4K display data region, but I guess the 96-pixel kernel would still take a lot of space?

Chris

[Spy Ship Sighted]

Nice - are you still trying to get it finished for PRGE?