Jeffrey Bouchard Posted March 16, 2015 Share Posted March 16, 2015 Glad to hear and see both an active community and topic. Also, happy that progress is continuing to be made and that this post stays updated. With that being said, is this any closer to a release? Keeping fingers crossed but realizng that tons of work continues on this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted March 16, 2015 Share Posted March 16, 2015 (edited) Glad to hear and see both an active community and topic. Also, happy that progress is continuing to be made and that this post stays updated. With that being said, is this any closer to a release? Keeping fingers crossed but realizng that tons of work continues on this. We're definitely trudging forward. intvsteve has made significant progress on the GUI. I'll let him report his side. I'm in the process of filling out the baseline functionality needed for a hardware release. LTO Flash! is field upgradeable, so we can always enhance it further post release. And in case anyone's worried that the field upgrade mechanism might be flaky, I'm doing the bulk of my development using that mechanism. It will be very well tested. I had hoped to make another big push last week during "spring break;" however, I spent a good part of my spring break catching up on day-job activities. I'm definitely pushing forward, though. In the background, I've had my stress test board continue to run stress tests on the filesystem layer. Millions of commands later, that board is still chugging along. It's been running nonstop since January 31st creating / deleting / renaming / etc. at the production bitrates and settings. It's pretty darn solid. I intend to let it keep banging away until I have to disconnect it for some reason. These stress tests did highlight some performance anomalies when the device is very full, and I addressed these back in January. It's now quite fast. What I'm currently working on is filling out the rest of the user interface details and minor features that really make LTO Flash! the ultimate Intellivision flash cartridge. Fun fact: I've actually run the production Kroz release on LTO Flash! and verified that it could use the JLP emulation to save/restore games with no changes to Kroz. I can even put multiple copies of Kroz on there, each with their own private save-game space, and that all works like a charm. I've also run my JLP feature stress test (which I used previously to validate JLP) to test LTO Flash!'s JLP emulation, and that works flawlessly as well. Fun fact #2: The filesystem supports a form of de-duplication. In the Kroz test I mentioned above, there was only one physical copy of Kroz on the cart, and just multiple menu entries. Each of the menu entries has its own save/restore context, despite sharing one copy of the Kroz ROM image. So, if folks start making heavy use of the save-game functionality, you could easily make multiple copies of the game on LTO Flash! to keep one player's save-states separate from another, or to expand the number of save-states beyond what the game supports, without blowing lots of flash storage. Fun fact #3: LTO Flash! supports save-game support for Download & Play (D&P) mode as well. D&P is meant mainly for developers, where you can download a game to LTO Flash! without taking the time to put it somewhere in the menu tree. Just download it and play it now. This allows developers to easily test their save-game code in a tight edit-compile-debug cycle on real hardware. Sure, not everyone develops this way, but for those that do, LTO Flash! helps you. Edited March 16, 2015 by intvnut 8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freewheel Posted March 16, 2015 Share Posted March 16, 2015 TL;DR - "I've been spending way too much time posting to AA to really focus on LTO Flash!" I kid, I kid. But I am curious where I can find details on JLP save/restore, if it's publicly available knowledge Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KnechtRuprecht Posted March 17, 2015 Share Posted March 17, 2015 We're definitely trudging forward. intvsteve has made significant progress on the GUI. I'll let him report his side. I'm in the process of filling out the baseline functionality needed for a hardware release. LTO Flash! is field upgradeable, so we can always enhance it further post release. And in case anyone's worried that the field upgrade mechanism might be flaky, I'm doing the bulk of my development using that mechanism. It will be very well tested. I had hoped to make another big push last week during "spring break;" however, I spent a good part of my spring break catching up on day-job activities. I'm definitely pushing forward, though. In the background, I've had my stress test board continue to run stress tests on the filesystem layer. Millions of commands later, that board is still chugging along. It's been running nonstop since January 31st creating / deleting / renaming / etc. at the production bitrates and settings. It's pretty darn solid. I intend to let it keep banging away until I have to disconnect it for some reason. These stress tests did highlight some performance anomalies when the device is very full, and I addressed these back in January. It's now quite fast. What I'm currently working on is filling out the rest of the user interface details and minor features that really make LTO Flash! the ultimate Intellivision flash cartridge. Fun fact: I've actually run the production Kroz release on LTO Flash! and verified that it could use the JLP emulation to save/restore games with no changes to Kroz. I can even put multiple copies of Kroz on there, each with their own private save-game space, and that all works like a charm. I've also run my JLP feature stress test (which I used previously to validate JLP) to test LTO Flash!'s JLP emulation, and that works flawlessly as well. Fun fact #2: The filesystem supports a form of de-duplication. In the Kroz test I mentioned above, there was only one physical copy of Kroz on the cart, and just multiple menu entries. Each of the menu entries has its own save/restore context, despite sharing one copy of the Kroz ROM image. So, if folks start making heavy use of the save-game functionality, you could easily make multiple copies of the game on LTO Flash! to keep one player's save-states separate from another, or to expand the number of save-states beyond what the game supports, without blowing lots of flash storage. Fun fact #3: LTO Flash! supports save-game support for Download & Play (D&P) mode as well. D&P is meant mainly for developers, where you can download a game to LTO Flash! without taking the time to put it somewhere in the menu tree. Just download it and play it now. This allows developers to easily test their save-game code in a tight edit-compile-debug cycle on real hardware. Sure, not everyone develops this way, but for those that do, LTO Flash! helps you. Very exciting! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiLic0ne t0aD Posted March 17, 2015 Share Posted March 17, 2015 I'm soOo pumped about this, I can not wait to fire up my Intys with an LTO Flash cart.. or 2! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolfy62 Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Great work on this, thank you guys! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freewheel Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Make sure you only announce the release via Twitter 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Make sure you only announce the release via Twitter You kidding? I'm totally making it a MySpace exclusive. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Gunoz Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 You kidding? I'm totally making it a MySpace exclusive. That'll make Tom very happy! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 That'll make Tom very happy! 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolfy62 Posted March 21, 2015 Share Posted March 21, 2015 How about instagram? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kynrek Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 Im sold! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kynrek Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 Im sold! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kynrek Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 Im sold! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 How about instagram? It'd probably break their retro filters. And nobody needs to compete with that many pictures of someone's lunch. All the cool kids are on Snapchat these days. LTO Flash! gone in a flash! ;) Who am I kidding. We all know the truth: Availability will be announced on rec.games.video.classic where it can get lost among all the endless Atari and Commodore announcements and the occasional lone nutter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolfy62 Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 How about twitter instead? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolfy62 Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 M It'd probably break their retro filters. And nobody needs to compete with that many pictures of someone's lunch. All the cool kids are on Snapchat these days. LTO Flash! gone in a flash! ;) Who am I kidding. We all know the truth: Availability will be announced on rec.games.video.classic where it can get lost among all the endless Atari and Commodore announcements and the occasional lone nutter. Man, I didn't even know that existed! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted March 24, 2015 Share Posted March 24, 2015 How about twitter instead? We covered that back here... ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mdoerty Posted March 25, 2015 Share Posted March 25, 2015 I think should be announced on Tender. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolfy62 Posted March 25, 2015 Share Posted March 25, 2015 Ok, Tender it is then.....or that other random social media site! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pimpmaul69 Posted March 25, 2015 Share Posted March 25, 2015 Put a commercial up on vine. 7 seconds at a time... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeffrey Bouchard Posted March 29, 2015 Share Posted March 29, 2015 any updates? Can't wait! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeguychicago Posted March 29, 2015 Share Posted March 29, 2015 You kidding? I'm totally making it a MySpace exclusive. Dammit. I was hoping for a Compuserve forum-only exclusive. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted March 29, 2015 Share Posted March 29, 2015 (edited) Slow, but steady progress. I've been working on closing out all of the baseline features on the Intellivision side, and Steve's been working on the Mac side. In fact, I have queued up for this afternoon my side of Mac testing. Some recent implementation milestones: Bulletproof Intellivision 2 Compatibility. This should make any existing game Intellivision 2 compatible, and should be invisible to new games. Obviously, if you write a game that tries to put ROM at $04xx, I can't help you. But otherwise, the method I'm using should be undetectable by games (unless you design a program to expose it), and work with games I have not personally analyzed. ECS ROM Disable. This is what makes games that were previously incompatible with the ECS now compatible with it. I've tested a few games, such as PAC-MAN, Dig Dug, and so on. I've also tested it with games that are nominally compatible but unaware of the ECS (eg. Astrosmash), just to ensure it bypasses the ECS title screen when this mode is on. ECS ROM Disable is slightly more intrusive than INTV2 Compat, but should be safe to leave on. Manual Reader. The manual reader supports manual files up to 16000 lines. You can format them for 20 columns yourself, or you can let LTO Flash! word-wrap them for you. I took an unmodified copy of the IntyBASIC manual and threw it at it, and the result was surprisingly reasonable. (I won't say beautiful, but certainly reasonable.) Steve threw an unmodified copy of the GPL v2 license at it, with similar results. Lots of minor cleanups, such as single-frame display glitches when switching modes, etc. And, I believe I covered this last update: JLP accelerator and JLP game save/restore are implemented and working on LTO Flash! as well. Each game has its own private JLP save/restore area, and you can have multiple copies of the same game on the media each with private JLP save/restore area. A to-do item we're working on is making this completely transparent for folks developing new games with some tooling improvements in SDK-1600 / jzIntv. As usual, I'll let intvsteve describe progress on his side of the aisle. Edited March 29, 2015 by intvnut 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pimpmaul69 Posted March 29, 2015 Share Posted March 29, 2015 Slow, but steady progress. I've been working on closing out all of the baseline features on the Intellivision side, and Steve's been working on the Mac side. In fact, I have queued up for this afternoon my side of Mac testing. Some recent implementation milestones: Bulletproof Intellivision 2 Compatibility. This should make any existing game Intellivision 2 compatible, and should be invisible to new games. Obviously, if you write a game that tries to put ROM at $04xx, I can't help you. But otherwise, the method I'm using should be undetectable by games (unless you design a program to expose it), and work with games I have not personally analyzed. ECS ROM Disable. This is what makes games that were previously incompatible with the ECS now compatible with it. I've tested a few games, such as PAC-MAN, Dig Dug, and so on. I've also tested it with games that are nominally compatible but unaware of the ECS (eg. Astrosmash), just to ensure it bypasses the ECS title screen when this mode is on. ECS ROM Disable is slightly more intrusive than INTV2 Compat, but should be safe to leave on. Manual Reader. The manual reader supports manual files up to 16000 lines. You can format them for 20 columns yourself, or you can let LTO Flash! word-wrap them for you. I took an unmodified copy of the IntyBASIC manual and threw it at it, and the result was surprisingly reasonable. (I won't say beautiful, but certainly reasonable.) Steve threw an unmodified copy of the GPL v2 license at it, with similar results. Lots of minor cleanups, such as single-frame display glitches when switching modes, etc. And, I believe I covered this last update: JLP accelerator and JLP game save/restore are implemented and working on LTO Flash! as well. Each game has its own private JLP save/restore area, and you can have multiple copies of the same game on the media each with private JLP save/restore area. A to-do item we're working on is making this completely transparent for folks developing new games with some tooling improvements in SDK-1600 / jzIntv. As usual, I'll let intvsteve describe progress on his side of the aisle. did you test ecs disable with championship tennis as that is the one game that is completely incompatible? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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