sometimes99er Posted May 15, 2013 Share Posted May 15, 2013 Are you scanning binaries or counting while running games. Would like to see the latter and preferably with the TI-99/4A. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted May 15, 2013 Share Posted May 15, 2013 This is a static code count, not the occurances during execution. I think I could easily include a printf in MESS inside the CPU emulation to find out about the occurances during runtime. This will, of course, heavily amplify the numbers of those commands that are used in loops. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted May 15, 2013 Share Posted May 15, 2013 OK, done. This is the result of starting the TI-99/4A, entering Editor/Assembler, load and run the soft-scrolling demo, then exit, plug in Munchman, start the game, exit after 15 seconds. Note that I did not differentiate between word and byte commands in the last statistics. (Hmm ... why didn't I do it this way the last time?) 2625576 MOVB 2084218 JNE 1538164 DEC 882559 JEQ 785892 MOV 567033 ANDI 537855 LI 515825 B 445086 TB 431942 SWPB 357957 SRL 281136 CLR 232614 LIMI 230950 JMP 225351 SETO 206597 LDCR 199537 JOC 191009 INC 190570 INV 189890 JLT 189008 STCR 185686 SZC 177939 BL 165085 SLA 143935 C 133256 CB 117836 AI 106403 ORI 95228 INCT 91591 CI 73058 JGT 58933 A 53266 SZCB 52223 JL 35656 SBO 35552 SOC 35496 DECT 26751 MPY 24161 DIV 22233 SRA 17970 COC 16262 JNC 14322 AB 12958 JH 12379 LWPI 12232 S 9776 JHE 5255 RTWP 5125 ABS 3645 SRC 3605 CZC 3018 STST 2875 BLWP 2624 STWP 1491 SBZ 1158 SB 899 XOR 851 JLE 504 NEG 300 JNO 273 SOCB 24 X 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matthew180 Posted May 15, 2013 Share Posted May 15, 2013 Interesting to see how things moved around, and that XOP didn't even make the list. There is a lot of byte-oriented moving going on in the 9900 code for sure, and heavy cycle users like MPY, DIV, and BLWP moved down quite a bit. TB had a big jump, probably due to the way the 99/4A reads the keyboard and joystick, which is probably due to running MunchMan. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
senior_falcon Posted May 16, 2013 Share Posted May 16, 2013 (edited) Meant to post in the 1980's computer thread. Edited May 16, 2013 by senior_falcon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted May 16, 2013 Share Posted May 16, 2013 I think TB goes up the list because of file I/O. As I said, I also included reading from floppy. The first lines show the stereotypical way of looping: MOVB, DEC, JNE. I think we should have made more use of MOV, DECT, JNE. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted May 16, 2013 Share Posted May 16, 2013 Very interesting. I did ask for games and got just that. Thanks. Wonder if the boot, TI Basic, XB and something GPL oriented like perhaps Car Wars would change anything. And Parsec to balance it. Either way, this makes the TI-99/4A appear even more 8-bit type machine in my eyes. Obviously heavy use of VDP - and even more so on machines with no extra RAM, which were perhaps more than 90% of sold consoles. Virtually no CPU RAM (even the Coleco game console came with 4 times more), multiplexer, waitstates, 8K cart area (Coleco has 32K), GROM, GPL, ... Stuff like Elite and GeOS seem easier on C64, Spectrum and MSX. Would have thought that BL would rank higher. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willsy Posted May 16, 2013 Share Posted May 16, 2013 What's the word on this SAMS card? Ninerpedia suggests that it may be in production, but I'm not sure how up-to-date that is. The article says "The card is in production again as a kit (summer 2007)", but that's 6 years ago now. I think Mike Dudek still sells them as kits or finished boards via eBay. Search eBay for the user mdude and you might find one listed, or shoot him a message. He used to have a website but I think that's gone now. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willsy Posted May 16, 2013 Share Posted May 16, 2013 True, but don't you have to set-up what is being incremented and get it into the accumulator or something like that (showing my lack of 8-bit CPU knowledge here)? For some things, yes, others no. For example, on the Z80 you can add H to L without using the A (accumulator) register (IIRC - it's been years!) but if you want to do, say a logical operation, only the accumulator can do them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willsy Posted May 16, 2013 Share Posted May 16, 2013 I think you get more savings with byte-code where you are running against a virtual machine. That way a single byte-code instruction can perform what would be many assembly instructions, thus you get better instruction density with the byte-code and trade off some speed and control. Definately. Forth scores here. And there are different flavours of Forth VMs: On some, the 'code thread' is a list of addresses, (fast) and on others it's a byte-code which indicates the offset into an array of addresses (slower, but half the size). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted May 24, 2013 Author Share Posted May 24, 2013 I think Mike Dudek still sells them as kits or finished boards via eBay. Search eBay for the user mdude and you might find one listed, or shoot him a message. He used to have a website but I think that's gone now. Thanks Willsy - I somehow missed your response here. I searched mdude, but only returned a few unwrapped carts. - neat, but not really what I was looking for. I'll just have to keep my eyes pealed, as I would *really* like to upgrade from the 32k I have now . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted May 24, 2013 Author Share Posted May 24, 2013 A cursory search for Elite source code lead me to this site: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/bbc/index.htm#src , but unfortunately, the link on that page appears to be dead. It can't be *that* hard to find I would think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted June 1, 2013 Author Share Posted June 1, 2013 (edited) Another one I've gotta ask about: . It's a pretty neat looking game - I sure wish there was something of the like for the TI: it seems like Parsec was the best space game the TI had, and that was just a side scroller. Edited June 1, 2013 by RobertLM78 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted June 1, 2013 Share Posted June 1, 2013 That was truly an amazing arcade game back then. Sitdown version. Spend quite some money on it. The Amiga version, as I recall, was a pretty good conversion. Here's a quick TI mockup based on an Atari 5200 screenshot. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted June 1, 2013 Author Share Posted June 1, 2013 It looks like an amazing game. We had the Atari "VCS" back in the day, but we sure didn't have anything this cool . (Although we did have River Raid - that was a pretty cool game for back in the day ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted June 1, 2013 Share Posted June 1, 2013 The ColecoVision version of Star Wars is respectable, but, with modern cartridge sizes we may be able to do better. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted June 2, 2013 Share Posted June 2, 2013 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RXB Posted June 2, 2013 Share Posted June 2, 2013 I recommend the SAMS and all Assembly. With 1024K it would be awesome! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted June 2, 2013 Author Share Posted June 2, 2013 I recommend the SAMS and all Assembly. With 1024K it would be awesome! Speaking of SAMS, my searches for one of those haven't returned anything and I'd really like to get one (of course, preferably the 1024K version ). Two upgrades that I need are a SAMS card and an F18A (of course, the latter I know how to get: thank you Matthew for putting those together - I'll be ordering one ASAP ). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RXB Posted June 2, 2013 Share Posted June 2, 2013 I have a original 1024K SAMS card but as I normally use only Classic99 I still love it. That is why I built SAMS into RXB. All the original Commands for the SAMS are built in for anything you want to do in RXB. But to simplify the SAMS I put in CALL AMSBANK to switch lower 8K pages. Of course I also built CALL BLOAD and CALL BSAVE to load or save lower 8K to PGM Image files. The SAMS would be something 100% better then SuperCarts as how the hell do you switch memory from a SuperCart on the fly? The SAMS solved this issue with a very small Assembly program to do so, unlike SuperCarts that are complicated as hell and never two the same. Rich Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted March 19, 2014 Author Share Posted March 19, 2014 I've been thinking about Elite again, and how our beloved TI doesn't really have any kind of space game that can compare . It would be awesome to play this game on the TI and would give the machine a high caliber space game too . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asmusr Posted March 20, 2014 Share Posted March 20, 2014 The best chance of some decent vector graphics on the TI is probably the method recently described by artrag that allows the bottom 2/3 of the screen to be double buffered: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/210888-smooth-scrolling/page-11?do=findComment&comment=2900634 With this method you could produce flicker free monochrome vector graphics, but the update speed would probably be limited to a few frames per second depending on the complexity of the scene. Personally I would never attempt an Elite conversion as I think the result would be a disappointment. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
am1933 Posted March 20, 2014 Share Posted March 20, 2014 The best chance of some decent vector graphics on the TI is probably the method recently described by artrag that allows the bottom 2/3 of the screen to be double buffered: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/210888-smooth-scrolling/page-11?do=findComment&comment=2900634 With this method you could produce flicker free monochrome vector graphics, but the update speed would probably be limited to a few frames per second depending on the complexity of the scene. Personally I would never attempt an Elite conversion as I think the result would be a disappointment. Can you hear it?-the sound of a grown man crying 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMole Posted March 20, 2014 Share Posted March 20, 2014 Never played Elite, but from the few video's I've seen about it in the past it doesn't look like you ever have more than one object on the screen at once? If so, and seeing the simplicity of the geometry I'd reckon it could be doable... But I'm not volunteering, let me finish my side scrolling platformer first . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
am1933 Posted March 20, 2014 Share Posted March 20, 2014 Never played Elite, but from the few video's I've seen about it in the past it doesn't look like you ever have more than one object on the screen at once? If so, and seeing the simplicity of the geometry I'd reckon it could be doable... But I'm not volunteering, let me finish my side scrolling platformer first . I have played Elite to a degree that is totally unhealthy on various platforms and there are several instances in the game where multiple vector objects are on screen at the one time. This can occurr mainly during combat or on approach to a space station. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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