Remember this post back in 2006 where I said Chimera text would look similar to the Atari 8-bit, like this?
Well, we've taken another step closer to doing that today, via fast queues.
Right now I'm populating the queues manually. The next step is for Delicon to render the Atari 8-bit OS ROM font data directly into the queues. Then we'll have the foundation of the game select menu.
This kernel does support changing the sprite and background colors on each row. I'm just no
It's been a while so now is as good a time to post a Chimera update as any.
You may not know this, but there are two arm projects in the pipeline, Chimera, and something which doesn't yet have an official name. Call it either QuickCart or Chimera Jr. Batari is spearheading that project. The QuickCart does not use a CPLD. It's very similar to what Chimera was supposed to be initially, but we would have had to sacrifice CPU availability to do it that way. Anyway, Batari has been very succ
I created a poll to measure interest in a CyberTech AV mod "2.0" for the 2600. Please post your thoughts there.
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=127949
If you've been reading this blog you'll know that I've set a bar at a certain point in Chimera development. Once it passes that point, I will consider the project in a releasable state and will start moving on final preparations for production. The biggest showstopper we had with the last rev of the boards was a weird video interference pattern that would show up even on my A/V modded system. It was a very time consuming process to diagnose this issue. Delicon was meticulous in revising the
OK, we're at enough of a milestone here to justify an official blog post.
Here is what's been going on.
First off, we didn't get the accuracy in the paddle reads that we wanted from the new isolated ADCs. Delicon tried to implement a more 2600-like reading approach using the ARM's "Capture" facilities but it also is a little jittery. In both cases, close but no cigar. So instead of holding up the project just for paddles, we decided to adjust the expansion port pinout to align the cap
Just a quick note about some changes in the current board design.
First off, the SRAM area has two footprints on them in order to accomodate two different kinds of SRAM chips. The SRAM chip is what is used to house the ROM code (or the cart RAM in the case of Supercharger, Ram+, etc...). So it can accomodate chips from 128K up to a whopping 512K. Before it was maxed out at 256K.
On the ARM front, during the hiatus, NXP released yet another ARM variation called the 2387. This has a fu
I've actually had a lot of experience working with speech synthesizers. Back in the day I had S.A.M. That program completely captivated me. I'd say it was one of the best things I remember about the Atari 8-bit. It's also why I was sorely disappointed by the 1400XL prototype I picked up when I learned that its Votrax chip did not allow you to adjust all of the vocal attributes. I had always wished I had an Alien Voice Box because that thing supposedly could sing. I think that used the same
The bun is in the oven.
For comparison, you can see how things have evolved from 10.0:
To 10.2 (see gallery)
We hope this to be the board that ships. As you can see, some effort was spent on final cosmetics.
More details as events warrant.
I'll probably have a real update within a week or so but last I heard from Delicon (recently) he was back to work on the final PCB layout. He told me he found a new microSD slot that allows the ARM to know at all times whether a card is inserted or not, which should enable the media to be more hot-swappable. So the engineering improvements continue right on down to the wire
As you know, I'm curious to see what those repro 2600 cart cases are going to go for. I may not be able to buy into
I've just not been the kind of person to be on the quick upgrade treadmill so every time I do the upgrade I feel this pang of guilt, and this secret hope that this time is going to be the last time. But it never is. Something better always comes along. But in the meantime, I try to be content with what I have for as long as I can stand it. I wait around for a sweet spot on the progress curve before I buy stuff. When I buy stuff, I immediately fret over the instant obsolescence. Like when I
I have to vent here. Am I the only one who thinks it was a ludicrous idea to use a cryptic acronym to reference every possible combination of horizontal and vertical resolution in computer monitors??? Okay, maybe back 20 years ago when all you had was CGA and VGA, but in 2007??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_display_standard
Someone stop the madness!!
What is the point? Is it so much harder to just type 1680x1050 rather than reading WSXGA+ and having to look up
Today Delicon finished E7 support (for Burgertime). That signals the completion of all legacy bankswitching schemes except for handling weird 3F variations. He will also trace back over Supercharger to make the multiloading pull in separate files rather than the concatenated approach currently used. This should work better with serial fallback or homebrews with lots of loads.
This pretty much completes the CPLD core development outside of Chimera Native.
Once the menuing functions a
It looks like the "noise" issue is also making magic writes in relation to queues unstable. On my 2600 in particualar no tweaking of the CPLD core would resolve the issues. However, my 7800 which shows no visible noise problem exhibited no queue problems. Same with Delicon's 6-switcher. So the tentative conclusion is that the clocking circuits are fundamentally "correct" but that the current board design is not ready to be shared. So for the time being we're just going to press ahead with t
Delicon was away for a while on business but he's back now. He babysat while I swapped out the crystal on my board. It went through surgery OK. We then spent some time troubleshooting queues against the newest core and firmware. He came to the conclusion that because of the new crystal he has to redo the CPLD timing from scratch. Hopefully that will resolve the remaining issues.
It's pretty important that we do the final validation on this before we send out beta carts.
Sorry in advance for this cross-referencing but I wanted to make sure everyone came across this.
Here is my post announcing the call for beta developers:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=114779
Since we're making one more revision, and in response to Batari's need for more memory for Superbug, we looked into supporting more than 128KB of cart SRAM and it now looks like we should be able to accomodate chips all the way up to 512K. This should help future-proof the design a little bit although I'm not sure we'll ship the cart with anything over 128KB. It really depends on all your feedback. For Chimera Native games, that much memory isn't really that important as you can bring in more
Chimera is going to primarily be controlled via an onscreen menuing system. But since we don't have that yet, we've been doing things through a terminal session. However, we decided to beef that up a bit. We're going to make the terminal session use ANSI colors. Here is a preview of some static screens:
We're giving it kind of a BIOS screen look.
There will also be a functional hex editor so you can do some real low-level debugging operations.
I am kind of amused at my own hacking skills here. One thing that we were going to have to do with Chimera was allow a serial "fallback" for game loading. Removable storage was not part of the original specs for Chimera. So we were going to be constrained by whatever flash chip was installed in it (currently 2MB). Once you fill up your games, you have to keep juggling things around. And for embedded Chimera games, the game would be read-only or maybe just allow limited space for other title
Here is a zipfile with all the required elements (except for Tera Term itself) to perform supercharger autoloading.
When I ran the Supercharger programming contest I was hoping someone would run with this idea. The good thing about this is that it is forward-compatible. As long as your game only uses one controller port, you can leave these hooks in and it won't hurt anything for CC2 or Chimera (when the time comes). So if you were writing a large Supercharger game you could do it knowing
I've came to a realization last night that I really want to take some kind of vocational EE courses. I can't keep relying on other people to come to my rescue all the time. If anyone has any recommendations on how to proceed, let me know.
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