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NTSC core for VBXE?


Joey Z

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35 minutes ago, drac030 said:

Roughly tested, but I have no idea if the colors are correct. I can only say that when the NTSC palette is enabled, the display looks different. The console screen gets purple instead of the usual blue, for example.

Can't you simply set the text and background colors from the SDX command line or via a batch file? I remember talking with @Stephen about this a couple years ago when I installed a VBXE in one of my machines. 

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6 hours ago, Piotr D. Kaczorowski said:

A planned update for the 80-column driver will be tailored to the VBXE core for the NTSC region.

 

4 hours ago, drac030 said:

Well, and here it is:

 

a) the regular one: svbxe111.arc

b) the Rapidus one: svbxe816.arc

 

Roughly tested, but I have no idea if the colors are correct. I can only say that when the NTSC palette is enabled, the display looks different. The console screen gets purple instead of the usual blue, for example.

What has been changed in the driver regarding the NTSC core?

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It is in fact indifferent to core. The only change is that the driver now contains an NTSC palette which is used for overlay modes while on an NTSC system. On PAL computers the PAL palette will be loaded instead (as it always has been).

 

This only affects the palette 1, which is used for the overlay modes being managed by the driver (like 80-col text mode and so on). Palettes 0, 2, 3 are unaffected.

 

I am not familiar with the "proper" look of the NTSC colors (PAL land here), so an NTSC-lander must take a look and say if everything is okay (or not). The palette being used is the one advertised to me as the "agreed upon" NTSC palette.

Edited by drac030
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21 minutes ago, drac030 said:

I am not familiar with the "proper" look of the NTSC colors (PAL land here), so an NTSC-lander must take a look and say if everything is okay (or not). The palette being used is the one advertised to me as the "agreed upon" NTSC palette.

 

I'm sure users will respond back here soon with the results. Thank you @drac030 for helping with this!

 

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Unfortunately VBXE Flasher FC.COM in previously published package was in wrong (debug / test) version. This wrong version displays "happy compilation" message at startup and is not functional - hence problems experienced by some of you while trying to flash new cores.

Proper version is included in attached package. Nothing else changed.

vbxe_package_20230910.zip

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On 9/9/2023 at 4:04 PM, bfollowell said:

 

I'm sure users will respond back here soon with the results. Thank you @drac030 for helping with this!

 

 

On 9/9/2023 at 10:25 AM, drac030 said:

Well, and here it is:

 

a) the regular one: svbxe111.arc

b) the Rapidus one: svbxe816.arc

 

Roughly tested, but I have no idea if the colors are correct. I can only say that when the NTSC palette is enabled, the display looks different. The console screen gets purple instead of the usual blue, for example.

Thank you @drac030, I will be trying this new driver out this evening. 🙂

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On 9/9/2023 at 10:25 AM, drac030 said:

Well, and here it is:

 

a) the regular one: svbxe111.arc

b) the Rapidus one: svbxe816.arc

 

Roughly tested, but I have no idea if the colors are correct. I can only say that when the NTSC palette is enabled, the display looks different. The console screen gets purple instead of the usual blue, for example.

Perhaps there is something I’m not doing correctly (certainly would not be the first time), but I can’t seem to do anything with the file svbxe111.arc. I can’t copy it from my SDrive Max to my hard disk partition, I can’t look inside the ARC file, I can’t unpack it. SDX doesn’t recognize the file system (error 148 - unknown file system). Is there something else I should be doing?

 

IMG_6398.png

IMG_6401.jpeg

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1 hour ago, mmoec said:

Apologies, but I have never had to open an atr file on a pc before....how exactly is this done? I don't seem to be able to accomplish this with the SD Max.

If you have Windows, you can use the MakeATR utility to add your ARC file to a new ATR disk image. I think you can do it from Altirra as well if you have that Atari emulator on your Windows machine. 
 

Bob C

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On 9/9/2023 at 2:41 PM, drac030 said:

It is in fact indifferent to core. The only change is that the driver now contains an NTSC palette which is used for overlay modes while on an NTSC system. On PAL computers the PAL palette will be loaded instead (as it always has been).

 

This only affects the palette 1, which is used for the overlay modes being managed by the driver (like 80-col text mode and so on). Palettes 0, 2, 3 are unaffected.

 

I am not familiar with the "proper" look of the NTSC colors (PAL land here), so an NTSC-lander must take a look and say if everything is okay (or not). The palette being used is the one advertised to me as the "agreed upon" NTSC palette.

I tried the files from this ARC file this morning but don't see that the colors are any different in 80 column mode. I still see the typical "aqua" PAL background color instead of the deeper NTSC blue. 

 

This may be user-error, however, or a misunderstanding on my part. I have my VBXE installed in a PAL machine but I would *like* to be able to have the NTSC colors that I am used to. 

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13 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

I tried the files from this ARC file this morning but don't see that the colors are any different in 80 column mode. I still see the typical "aqua" PAL background color instead of the deeper NTSC blue. 

 

This may be user-error, however, or a misunderstanding on my part. I have my VBXE installed in a PAL machine but I would *like* to be able to have the NTSC colors that I am used to. 

 

During the second half of the week, I will test it and report directly to @drac030 if needed.

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10 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

I tried the files from this ARC file this morning but don't see that the colors are any different in 80 column mode. I still see the typical "aqua" PAL background color instead of the deeper NTSC blue. 

 

This may be user-error, however, or a misunderstanding on my part. I have my VBXE installed in a PAL machine but I would *like* to be able to have the NTSC colors that I am used to. 

I installed the new driver this evening (thanks _The Doctor_ and darwinmac, I was able to make and open an .atr file in Altirra and put the SVBXE111.ARC file inside 🙂), it worked well for me, except I fine-tuned the text color to my liking. Here are the results (old driver, new driver, new driver fine-tuned):

 

IMG_6392.jpeg

IMG_6424.jpeg

IMG_6425.jpeg

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9 minutes ago, mmoec said:

I installed the new driver this evening (thanks _The Doctor_ and darwinmac, I was able to make and open an .atr file in Altirra and put the SVBXE111.ARC file inside 🙂), it worked well for me, except I fine-tuned the text color to my liking. Here are the results (old driver, new driver, new driver fine-tuned):

 

IMG_6392.jpeg

IMG_6424.jpeg

IMG_6425.jpeg

One interesting thing that I have noted: when the machine goes into the screen saver mode, only the border colors change, the foreground and background colors remain the same. 🤔

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4 minutes ago, mmoec said:

One interesting thing that I have noted: when the machine goes into the screen saver mode, only the border colors change, the foreground and background colors remain the same. 🤔

This has been the norm - I believe it's how the OS "screen saver" cycles colours.  It's not a bug in the new driver.

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26 minutes ago, Stephen said:

This has been the norm - I believe it's how the OS "screen saver" cycles colours.  It's not a bug in the new driver.

Actually, I'm fairly certain that the foreground and background colors are suppose to rotate as well, but no, I wouldn't call it a bug.

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13 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

This may be user-error, however, or a misunderstanding on my part. I have my VBXE installed in a PAL machine but I would *like* to be able to have the NTSC colors that I am used to.

The driver loaded the PAL palette, because it was running on a PAL machine. To override that (or, strictly speaking, invert the result of autodetection), you have to pass the /P switch to its (the driver's) command line. This is, by the way, written in the documentation file (S_VBXE.MAN) and in the changelog (S_VBXE.NEW), both included in the distribution archive.

 

3 hours ago, mmoec said:

when the machine goes into the screen saver mode, only the border colors change, the foreground and background colors remain the same

Color cycling is normally done by loading GTIA color registers with changing values on the VBL interrupt. When the 80-column VBXE mode is on, the only active GTIA register (apart from PM/G) is the one controlling the border. The foreground color and the background color are controlled in a completely different way by the VBXE hardware and it would be of more effort than sense to emulate that behaviour: VBXE has color attributes, each character's color is independent from any other, so it would be rather involved.

 

So no, it is not a bug, it is expected to behave so.

 

Edited by drac030
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4 hours ago, drac030 said:

The driver loaded the PAL palette, because it was running on a PAL machine. To override that (or, strictly speaking, invert the result of autodetection), you have to pass the /P switch to its (the driver's) command line. This is, by the way, written in the documentation file (S_VBXE.MAN) and in the changelog (S_VBXE.NEW), both included in the distribution archive.

Thank you! (Who reads the manual? :P )

 

To be fair, I did read through the MAN files when I first installed the VBXE in my machine, but it’s been a couple years ago and that option either wasn’t there or I forgot. I did fail to scan the changelog for your new version though and that’s entirely on me. Appreciate the help nonetheless. 

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