stardot.org.uk

The scrolling is similar to what I described in the smb thread. In SMB weren't you plotting every non-blank tile every frame? Surely there's too many in MODE 1 to be able to do that with such a great frame rate? Do you just render edges instead? (Presumably with four versions of each tile for each ...

+1000 to that!

This looks absolutely superb! I'm astonished with how much you're managing to pack into a 20ms frame! I think, technically, this must be your best work yet. Can't wait to give it a go when it's finished (although I already predict that I'm going to be terrible at it - Rocket Raid used to give me eno...

Sounds good. I'd probably have extended it all the way to support 16 channels - I mean, why not, right? I'd also extend ENVELOPE to allow for different waveforms and so on. When you're synthesising the sound yourself, there are no limits really!

The O.S. 'ran in user mode', suggesting that it was microkernel based. The synchronisation primitives of the original microkernel were sufficiently slow that the SWP instruction was subsequently added to the ARM ISA to allow user mode code to implement semaphores without going via the microkernel. ...

Good digging! (I tried to find where I'd got the info from, and failed.) I'd be interested to know where this observation was first made. It is documented in that famous OS 1.20 disassembly, in as much as the lookup table's purpose is correctly described, although the code which uses it makes no co...

What a peculiar feature! And, as you say, pretty terrible too, if it doesn't scale with the frequency, so that higher notes are detuned more than lower ones. I think that's an OS 1.20 misfire (and they could've saved themselves some space by not doing that as well!).

My first computer was an Oric-1, which could load/save to tape at 2400 or 300 baud. 2400 baud never ever worked properly, so I always recorded at 300 baud, which even sounded slow. I never quite understood the Beeb cassette hardware. So the ULA has baud rate settings for transmit and receive, and th...

Nothing to do with me; this is Dominic's immense genius at work here!

I assume it'd make the characters thinner with more space between them (I assume it's some kind of shift register which emits pixels one by one, and when it's over, it's blank). But here's another question: the teletext pixel clock is 6MHz but, with character rounding, it actually needs 12MHz for th...

For now I'd just be inclined to rewrite the macros within BeebAsm's limitations and change the 0s in the callsites to start+<whatever>. BeebAsm's maintained by the community here these days - I haven't touched it in years - so not sure when you might be able to get these changes in (although feel fr...

(Incidentally, I don't think this would be particularly different to implement either; A%..Z% could live in the symbol table like any other symbol, and be force created and initialized to zero at the beginning of each pass. Then the assignment code could make a special case of them. BeebAsm already ...

Hey Kevin The problem with supporting mutable variables in BeebAsm is that, even though it is implemented as a two-pass assembler, it doesn't present itself as such. Thus when symbols are forward referenced, the expectation is that they will have unambiguously one and only one value. Seems to me tha...

Apple ][ is 280x200 I believe (each character block is 7 pixels across, bizarrely). So it may well have come from Applesoft BASIC originally.

The reason is so that 'forward searches' (such as to find the ELSE in an IF clause) can be performed very efficiently, because you know you won't encounter the token for ELSE (in this case) in any other context. If you allow arbitrary binary constants to appear in a program, any such search needs t...

I've occasionally contemplated whether you could improve the performance of 6502 BBC BASIC by tokenising numeric literals. With an extra 16k of ROM there'd almost certainly be room to do that along with other features. I'd imagine replacing the ASCII representation of the number with a token byte, f...

In the third program edit line 60 to change the plus to a minus: - 60 PRINT CHR$(32+3*(C-INT(C)<.4)); + 60 PRINT CHR$(32-3*(C-INT(C)<.4)); I guess Apple BASIC uses +1 for TRUE. Yes, I also spotted that. There's also a boolean expression in line 40 which needs changing: - 40 A=ATN(Y/X)+(X<0)*SGN(Y)*...

From memory, I think B-Em scrimps on ADC emulation and doesn't generate and handle as many IRQs as real hardware. Have you compared with jsbeeb to see if you get more reasonable results? Also try turning off the ADC (*FX16) to see if that gives closer results on B-Em. Can't speak at all for BeebEm a...

It's amazing to think how we did it back then: armed with just BBC BASIC with its built-in assembler, its clunky line editing, and ingenious ways of working around the memory limits. Matt and I did the first version of Blurp and a few other things like that, although we'd written a ROM which gave us...

Another possibility is only allowing time-limited editing, apart from the first post of a topic, via this extension: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/extension/gn36_firstpostedit If you've already read a post, it's easy to miss any subsequent edits to it, so this doesn't seem like a bad idea to me...

I have had a look over lunch, it does seem fairly easy to make a forum theme based on the current one that omits the edited message footer unless someone puts something in the reason box. If this sounds like it would mitigate most concerns then I'll put that into play this evening - it will require...

A good while back, I think the forum used to report all edits, and then this disappeared with one of the big upgrades. Since then, if I edit one of my own posts to add additional content or correct issues, I nearly always prefix it with 'Edit:' myself to make it clear that it's been added. I think t...

Cheers for the answer. However it looks a bit complicated for me. I am using a SD collection of games so looks like I need that specific drive with the game and load it manually? I do use special menu otherwise http://joxi.ru/v29Xeq1i3pY95m Yes - mount the disk image which contains Labyrinth and tr...

Any idea why that was done? :?: Maybe they thought it gave the graphics a strange swirly ethereal quality (which it certainly did on my TV) and thought it fitted the game. Or more likely it was just a mistake. It also has the effect of lowering the frame rate to 49.3fps but I doubt they did it to w...

Found it! This works on the Acornsoft release on the STH site - haven't tested any other versions.

Yeah Labyrinth programs the video controller with non-standard values, specifically the horizontal timing is too long for a PAL display. My TV even used to have some small problems with it back in the day. It'll be easy enough to patch I suspect, but it'll need someone to find where CRTC R0 is writt...

timmy wrote: ↑

Thu May 24, 2018 8:52 am

My school favourite was to do a quick:

Code: Select all

?&FE40=0:CLS

on all the machines before the teacher came and then sit down and wait for people to start typing...

What does that do? Enables sound chip writes at the same time as keyboard scan? It doesn't work on jsbeeb or B-Em... I wonder why?

Amazing the technology you can get these days.

I fully expect GitHub to end up with adverts everywhere though The annoying animating type that ended up all over Skype and MSN Messenger before it.

A counter which is preloaded and counts down to zero is very much preferable - but the block diagram doesn't indicate that.) And indeed we know it not to be the case, as it's possible to change registers during the CRTC frame, and their new value will be correctly used as the upper bound. Are there...