mizapf

Forth is compact and maybe also sufficiently fast, but I would call it a "write-only programming language". If you are the program author, you can have some joy with programming bottom-up and putting parts together, and in the end everything works fine, but if you want to understand someone else's Forth program, you not only need lots of documentation; you just cannot easily understand the program behavior without a pencil and paper at your side. This is because almost all program state is kept on a stack which is not visible in the program code. Also, it is farthest away from a natural language kind of readability. I don't have problems when reading C/C++/Java code to quickly get the idea, but all samples of Forth programs I saw so far look like secret code that you have to decipher. I had TEX-Forth and indeed wrote some small programs with it, but was quickly pulled over to C when it became available on the TI. Michael

Hi Tursi, as I said - I'm pretty sure the RPK format will stay with us. The plain zip is not what we had before: The difference is this new xml file that declares which parts of the zip go into which memory region. As for authentic / authoritative version, you should keep in mind that the MAME/MESS people understand their work as a documentation of past systems and software. In many cases there is no one left to ask or to deliver the proper version. So the RPKs are much better suited when there are new versions, patches, or mods. This becomes apparent with the current topic RXB where I would have to keep adding new version descriptions to this master xml file. Maybe I'll remove RXB from the softlist again and just offer it as RPK. Michael

OK, I managed to get RXB 2012 running in MESS. I added a new cartridge type for cartridges with GROM emulation, and all RXB modules are now member of this type. I could not get some earlier versions running, however. I uploaded a new RPK and zip file to ftp://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/cartridges . This RPK should (no, must) be used from now on if RXB shall be run under MESS. There are still problems with Super Extended Basic. I noticed that there are memory accesses at 7c00 (and following) and read accesses at 7f00 and following. If anyone has a detailed description about the memory layout please contact me (i.e. is there RAM in the area or a mapper, or another device?). Michael

Some questions concerning the variants of Extended Basic: Extended Basic v2.4, v2.6 look different than RXB versions. Are they also RXB or something different? Also, I have "Extended Basic v2.5" with no mentioning of "RXB", but rxb24 and rxb26 which look equal except for the version number. Is that supposed to be named rxb25? I need to make sure we do not have a mix-up of different kinds of Extended Basic. Also, I'd need the publishing years of the RXB versions (1002, 1005, 2000, 2001, 2002, 237, 24, (25?,) 26, 555). Michael

I don't want to praise my own works here, but the really fun thing is the new archiver support. Indeed, I have a "public class Archive extends Directory" in my code. With all consequences... Michael

@Tursi, regarding ZIP and RPK. In short, RPKs have not been adopted by MAME, and partly because there was a parallel development which led to this different kind of media handling. As a result, only the emulated TI systems in MESS support RPKs now (I moved all the support into the gromport.c file so that it is safe from being killed (un)intentionally some day). In the next MESS release, the TI systems will also offer these software lists, so I hope everybody of them is happy now. But I admit that there are some advantages of the zip handling compared to the RPKs, so it could make sense for you to consider the zip instead of the RPK. But as I said, the RPK support will continue to be there. The zip files only contain the bin files, no XML description. This is moved into the MAME/MESS system, and it does have some advantages: - Although we may not distribute the ROMs of the cartridges, we can at least define which ROMs are the correct ones by specifying the SHA1 hash. There are always bad dumps appearing here and there, which is a lesser problem for our systems, but I remember those broken TI-99/8 ROMs. - The other developers agree that the RPKs is a good way to include cartridges that are homebrew and for which there are no authoritative versions. - As the layout is fixed inside MAME/MESS there is less chance that there are errors when creating an RPK from bin files. - People who have the bin files need not learn the XML format of RPK. Example. This is the layout.xml from entended_basic.rpk: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <romset version="1.0"> <resources> <rom id="gromimage" file="phm3026g.bin"/> <rom id="romimage" file="phm3026c.bin"/> <rom id="rom2image" file="phm3026d.bin"/> </resources> <configuration> <pcb type="paged"> <socket id="grom_socket" uses="gromimage"/> <socket id="rom_socket" uses="romimage"/> <socket id="rom2_socket" uses="rom2image"/> </pcb> </configuration> </romset> Beside that, there is a file called meta-inf.xml in an RPK. <?xml version="1.0"?> <meta-inf> <name>Extended Basic</name> <year>1981</year> <dist>Texas Instruments</dist> <number>PHM 3026</number> <status version="110"/> </meta-inf> and the three files phm3026c.bin, phm3026d.bin, phm3026g.bin. With the new software lists, we have a zip file with the three bin files only. The layout information is contained in MESS as the file ti99_cart.xml. This file contains the descriptions of all the available cartridges. It is a sequence of <software> elements of this kind: <!-- Softlist entry for Extended Basic --> <software name="exbasic"> <description>Extended Basic</description> <year>1981</year> <publisher>Texas Instruments</publisher> <info name="serial" value="PHM 3026"/> <info name="version" value="110"/> <part name="cart" interface="ti99_cart"> <feature name="pcb" value="paged"/> <dataarea name="grom_socket" size="0x8000"> <rom name="phm3026g.bin" size="0x8000" crc="1a977b8c" sha1="ac30cc0ba075661b9c853b3fda47b4f4accbe25c" offset="0x0000" /> </dataarea> <dataarea name="rom_socket" size="0x2000"> <rom name="phm3026c.bin" size="0x2000" crc="bd8addb9" sha1="d0be337b61552f7ac49d52872f66eb6ef549a774" offset="0x0000" /> </dataarea> <dataarea name="rom2_socket" size="0x2000"> <rom name="phm3026d.bin" size="0x2000" crc="44c4d8a8" sha1="db2850db78431d89de85dd573e6df76151b25aba" offset="0x0000" /> </dataarea> </part> </software> The advantage is that these lists not only cover cartridges, but other media like disk images as well. For instance, we could include the Editor/Assembler disks 1 and 2 in the softlist as well, and you could then select one to be inserted in drive 1. The new softlist handling allows MESS to search for possible matches: mess ti99_4a -cart exbas "exbas" approximately matches the following supported software items (best match first): * Software list "ti99_cart" (TI-99/4A cartridges) matches: exbasic1 Extended Basic v100 exbas25 Extended Basic v2.5 exbaspl Extended Basic Plus exbasic Extended Basic exbasm Mechatronic/PS Extended Basic superxb Super Extended Basic edupack Edu-Pack escape Escape blackhl Black Hole nature Nature's Way so now we can start Extended Basic in two ways: mess ti99_4a -cart extended_basic.rpk or mess ti99_4a -cart exbasic I'll put all that stuff on ninerpedia so it won't get lost. Michael

Is there any technical documentation concerning the GROM simulation on the non-TI cartridges, or is it safe to assume that these cartridges behave like GRAMKracker? Michael

Hi there, please allow me to inform you about a new release of TIImageTool. For those who have not heard from it before, it is a tool that allows you to open disk image files as used with many emulators, and to work on them with common disk operations (like cut/copy/paste of files). It is particularly tailored for use with MESS but can also be used with other emulators. Supports: Sector Dump Format (also known as v9t9 format) Track Dump Format (aka PC99 format) CHD Format (MESS container for hard disk images), new: create, extract, convert CHD Working with files, directories (creating, moving, deleting, renaming...) XModem sender and receiver included Serial bridge (to enable real RS232 connection with MESS) File system check New: Archiver support (can process Archiver files on the images) New: Create a Geneve boot disk (included GeneveOS 6.50 redist release) and more You can download a copy from http://www.ninerpedi...php/TIImageTool . License is GPL v3. You need a Java Runtime Environment (Java Platform SE 5 or higher), and for the serial port features you also need the RXTX library. Have fun, Michael

Next MESS version will have another cartridge feature (which the other devs have been urging me to include for years): the software lists. You can then choose a cartridge from a predefined list, and the cartridges are stored as zip files. These zip files contain the bin files (as the RPKs do, which also have a layout file). Would it be better to distribute the zips? People who want to use them for Classic99 may then simply unpack them, and for MESS you just keep the zips. The opposite is not so good because you must use the zip name as hardcoded into the software list. Michael

Hi OX, usually I'm open to suggestions for enhancements of the MESS emulation, and I did add some features to make it better usable in the last years. The .bin handling was removed by me some years ago to simplify usage, to make it less error prone, to allow for multi-cartridge handling, to simplify coding within MESS, and to make it consistent with the remaining media handling. But we have the complete cartridge collection on whtech.com, already prepared as RPKs (345 cartridges) and ready to use. Still, I hope this does not hold back people to upgrade to the latest MESS version, because many things have been added in the meantime. Check http://www.ninerpedia.org/index.php/MESS_version_history for the features that have changed over the years. So please have a look at ftp.whtech.com (subdirectory emulators) and tell me if you have a cartridge that is not contained there. As you see I'm sorry to say, but .bin handling will surely not return, for quite a lot of reasons. I'm surprised to hear that people still use .bin formats. Michael

So that means "Super Extended Basic" is indeed a real cartridge (not just some files to be loaded into GramKracker)? If this is true I'll add a new cartridge type to MESS for those cartridges with a GROM simulation so it will quickly be available again. Another question would be whether this GROM simulator runs at maximum speed, or whether the GROMs are also simulated from their timing behavior (with additional wait states). Extensions like HSGPL or GK provide a noticeably higher execution speed as they are not using real GROMs. Michael @kl99: Hallo Klaus, ich dachte, ich schaue mal hier vorbei.

LOL, legendary ... Where I was? Well, who's hiding behind "atari"? :-) I only knew about this group because it has sometimes been mentioned in the Yahoo groups. As it seems, there are indeed some interesting topics here. (Oh my, gonna have to read one more forum now...) Michael

Hi Rich, guess you're out there somewhere. I noticed a problem in MESS concerning RXB. After compiling a software list for TI cartridges, I noticed that RXB did not work anymore, none of its versions. The reason is about a year back when I actually fixed a bug in the GROM port handling. This made GROMs behave properly like real GROMs, meaning that they have 6 KiB storage space, and return some mirrored values for the last 2K. I saw that RXB makes use of the complete 8 K space. That is, I suppose it does not really use GROMs but only simulates GROMs. Questions: - Was there a real cartridge for RXB, or have you only been distributing the contents which need to be loaded in some specific way? - Apart from RXB, are there any real cartridges with a GROM simulation on-board? I know about GRAMKracker, and GK is also part of the MESS emulation. I'm thinking about ready-to-plug cartridges. The background of my questions is that I want to remove hypothetical features from MESS (like 8K GROMs or GRAMs); in turn, to allow RXB to be run as a cartridge, I can pretend that there is some real cartridge with a special "grom8k" type, and that way I can cover all these "soft" cartridges. Michael

Hi there, thought I should finally get me an atariage account ... I used to stay with the Yahoo groups, so you may know me from there, but for all others: I'm Michael Zapf, TI user since 1982, Geneve owner since 1990, ... ... and mainly responsible for the flawless working of the TI/Geneve emulations in MESS. For the last couple of years, the TI and Geneve emulations in MESS have proved to be very stable. They are reliable enough to do any kind of development on them as you would do on the real machine. Some months ago I wrote an XModem tool for MDOS completely within the emulation and later used it on the real machine. If anyone of you using MESS has any questions or problems when using please contact me. More information on that is on ninerpedia (http://www.ninerpedia.org/index.php/MESS) Michael