stardot.org.uk

I've released a new version of the two NuLA gallery demos, which I tweaked at ABUG over the weekend, and can confirm they run ok on Turbo MMC now.
https://github.com/simondotm/bbc-nula/releases/tag/1.0

Just a thought on the latest B-Em developments - GitHub releases looks like it might be a convenient way to distribute the various compiled binaries for B-Em ... for those of us without a build environment anyway. You can create a tagged release and upload compiled binaries as attachments. https://h...

sixxdog_uk wrote:

Richard,

SimonM wanted to be in room2 with his brother so , I've moved you back into the main room where you originally were mate.

Lol that's my "bro" kieran as in coder bro!

Great idea!

Good to know, thanks. Had no idea that old pc 5.25" drives were so rare now, hardly any on ebay and what is on there is £100!!!

Have just stumbled upon Kyroflux as a "thing" and it sounds excellent as a I have a ton of old 5.25" beeb floppies that need archiving and I like the comforting sound of an analogue capture direct to PC. If anyone has any tips on which drives work best with it that would be good. Also if anyone has ...

sbadger wrote:hmmmmmmmmm. still seems to hang at the Nula screen

Gah! Working somewhat in the dark here. Ok....

Cheers Dave. Looks like I'll be using MMFS on my beeb from now on then as I don't want to attempt removing the video ula from my master. it's like shaving yaks getting this working, I just tried to load MMFS into swram and *unplugged my smartspi rom, it just gives me 'Card?' Hmmm... on the assumpti...

Aha, outstanding sleuthing chaps, thanks. This probably means almost all of our demos wont work on this FS then, since we've been playing fast and loose with page 13, like forever! :lol: I've relocated this buffer and attached a patched SSD (this one has the old OSFILE/OSFIND code back in). Please c...

For what its worth, and in case it's helpful, here is the code as it was: Use OSFIND to open a file for read. If it succeeds: close the file proceed to load it using OSFILE (mainly so that we can get the file's load + exec address into a param block). otherwise: reset filename for the numbered file ...

hoglet wrote: Really???? where exactly?

My bad, thought these were the same things. I'm a n00b on this stuff.

Blerg! What fresh hell is that then I wonder??! Works ok for me in BeebEm...
Thanks for checking tho.

Can someone with the problem FS please try the attached SSD and see if behaves itself? It's a hacky version so doesnt look pretty but will at least indicate if we're on the right lines here... thx

If it fixes the issue, I'll tidy up the code and release patched SSDs

Now that we seem to have the theory that its OSFILE/OSFIND thats causing the issue, I'm currently putting in a workaround for this so we can see if that fixes it.

sure, good idea.
I see the source code for the SmartSPI ROM is on hoglets GitHub repo - maybe we can sniff out what the implementation of osfile looks like? I'm not especially skilled at this sort of code though.

Interesting findings sydney, thanks for looking into this. I'm willing to admit that my code tends to be fairly gung ho on memory usage as I'm usually writing demo code that nukes all pockets of memory for my own nefarious single purpose single platform uses, so its possible I'm trampling some works...

I'm afraid I haven't had time to look at this yet, and I'm not familiar with the problem device so if anyone else can offer a fix I'm happy to accept a pull request. The source is all on the GitHub.

Outstanding Rob! It looks truly awesome.

Im reminded that it would be great to get a BeebAsm repo going in the stardot team; it's such a useful tool and there's a number of useful patches around now.

Cool - glad you got it going. Feedback very welcome.

I'm happy to have a go at fixing it for you... but not sure where the problem would lie. I admit the disksys code is pretty hacky and assumptive, only needed it for loading data into sideways ram - basically it loads a sector at a time and copies it to a paged SWR bank. To be honest, I've often cons...

Three years later, but I just wanted to say thanks - this thread solved the same problem for me - ebay bought A3010 with HCCS XPan system that lost its config in transit. Hurrah for Stardot! If there's still interest I found what appears to be the PDF manual here: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory...

Nice! Great to see and hear fresh things, and that's a neat little BASIC proggy to drive it too!

Ok folks, for anyone who is interested, I've put the source code for the NuLA gallery program up on github:
https://github.com/simondotm/bbc-nula

There's a big old readme with some details of how it all works and how to make your own galleries etc.

Have fun!

kieranhj wrote:Without wanting to hijack Simon's thread again here's a quick raster bars demo for NULA. It's like having an Amiga, except with out the 16-bit CPU, RAM and all the custom chips.

Tip top Mr Kieran - very cool. I need to up my game now.

If anyone has any images or photos they want adding to the next volume just share here or PM me a link!

I might tweak that Tute image; not happy with how the dithering came out.

Yes, these are all images converted to Mode 2 format, but using the optimum 16 colour palette from the nulas 4096 colour range - goes to show what the beeb could have been capable of!

Those of you with the NuLA now installed might enjoy what I've been cooking up this weekend - some nice MODE2 pix to show off your new shiny mod! :D The demos are best on a Master, but should work fine on regular beebs too. If you run them on a machine without the NuLA be prepared for a horror show ...

Maybe you could use BeebAsm? Just assemble a sourcefile containing a bunch of PUTFILE commands and no source and have it write the output SSD. Only snafu there is you can't set the title. Just a thought anyways.