Supercharger banking with bB

[lord_mike]

From what batari told me about his decision not to officially support the M-Network bankswitching customizations that I'd added to bB v0.35 a while back, I don't think he would have added the Superchip option to bB if it weren't possible to produce actual carts for the games.

Yes, that's true; I'm resistant to work on supporting any schemes in which boards are not readily available for a reasonable price. But I do encourage others to add support themselves.

 

Since we are talking about bankswitching schemes... has anyone tried implementing the Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger 6K bankswitching model into BBasic?

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

[+batari]

From what batari told me about his decision not to officially support the M-Network bankswitching customizations that I'd added to bB v0.35 a while back, I don't think he would have added the Superchip option to bB if it weren't possible to produce actual carts for the games.

Yes, that's true; I'm resistant to work on supporting any schemes in which boards are not readily available for a reasonable price. But I do encourage others to add support themselves.

 

Since we are talking about bankswitching schemes... has anyone tried implementing the Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger 6K bankswitching model into BBasic?

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

Yes, Twisty Passages is a Supercharger game written in bB. However, I don't think I released any code yet. I don't have any qualms about fixing up and releasing the code someday, as one can make and sell Supercharger games (albeit on CD or cassette, but still.)

 

But I should warn about using the Supercharger. It has 6k, all of which can be used as RAM. But that 6k must be used for code and data, and it's all you have. It runs out quickly.

Edited March 4, 2010 by batari
broken URL

[lord_mike]

Yes, Twisty Passages is a Supercharger game written in bB. However, I don't think I released any code yet. I don't have any qualms about fixing up and releasing the code someday, as one can make and sell Supercharger games (albeit on CD or cassette, but still.)

 

Thanks, Batari for the info! But, I have one question.... is there an easy way do it in BBasic? According the manual, the only bankswitching schemes are 8K and above... is there an undocumented compiler directive that can be used for supercharger, or is the method too complicated to describe in a forum post? From what I understand, the supercharger uses 3, 2k banks...

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

I know it may seem silly to try and target the supercharger, but that is what I have readily available, and it's much easier and less expensive than having someone burn 8K (or above) untested carts for games that I'd like to program for my wife (as cute little gifts for birthdays and such). True, 6K isn't much, but it is more than 4K, and every byte helps!

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

Edited March 4, 2010 by batari

[+batari]

Twisty Passages is a Supercharger game written in bB. However, I don't think I released any code yet. I don't have any qualms about fixing up and releasing the code someday, as one can make and sell Supercharger games (albeit on CD or cassette, but still.)

 

Thanks, Batari for the info! But, I have one question.... is there an easy way do it in BBasic? According the manual, the only bankswitching schemes are 8K and above... is there an undocumented compiler directive that can be used for supercharger, or is the method too complicated to describe in a forum post? From what I understand, the supercharger uses 3, 2k banks...

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

I know it may seem silly to try and target the supercharger, but that is what I have readily available, and it's much easier and less expensive than having someone burn 8K (or above) untested carts for games that I'd like to program for my wife (as cute little gifts for birthdays and such). True, 6K isn't much, but it is more than 4K, and every byte helps!

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

For now, you'd be better off burning 4k games onto your Supercharger. There are many reasons, the least of which being that Twisty Passages doesn't use the full 6k for code space, rather 4k is used for code and 2k for the maze. So even using my code, you can't easily coax bB into using 6k code space...

 

The "support" for the Supercharger in this case is not native support, meaning there's no secret directives. All Supercharger memory and banking was done by inline asm, and the binary itself was built by means of an includes file which references custom asm files (including a custom kernel) which in turn reference a new header file.

 

I don't remember if I ever posted the Twisty Passages source, but I suppose it can't hurt. This is the 4k Minigame version. I just checked and it builds under bB 1.0, but only using the -O command-line switch to invoke the peephole optimizer (otherwise it is about 4 bytes too long.)

 

For that matter, I may have totally forgotten to mention the peephole optimizer. It can be used to recover a little space in some programs.

twisty_source.zip

Edited March 4, 2010 by batari

[lord_mike]

Thanks, Batari!!!