rensoup

May 4

On 5/2/2023 at 5:09 AM, Stephen said:

Hard pokey - yeah, Hard to listen to. Since you're a proxy for the banned member, please relay this reply.

Well, I'm sure he got it loud and clear...

May 1

hardpkmk.xex

Nice sounds. (not a fan of the tune)

May 1

18 hours ago, Solitaire01 said:

Hey all -- I socketed and replaced the RAM today (big thanks to a donor PC XT clone that was dead but had 640k of functioning NEC 4164's...your spirit will live on in my Atari). And it worked! Tonight my son and I played PoP side by side, he on the 130XE running it from BackBit Pro and me on the C64 running it from a SideKick64. Given their independent development and different art inspirations the two games feel incredibly similar in gameplay - a testament to how close they mirror the original. Great job!!

Thanks for keeping us updated!

May 1

hardpkmk.xex

nice sounds (not that much of a fan of the tune)

April 29

poksismk.xex

previous ninja pokey tune pokninmk.xex

April 29

On 4/28/2023 at 4:00 AM, JLsoft said:

...is there a downloadable release of dxRMT somewhere that I'm not seeing?

it's not out yet but you can download the beta on the discord server (I'll send you the link in pm)

April 23

nice classic pokey sound:

pokchpmk.xex

April 18

different style...

tchpkxMK.xex

April 16

On 4/13/2023 at 12:36 AM, _The Doctor__ said:

damn the squirrels getting busy and sounding much better on some of these. One busy squirrel now, and the .xex inclusions are very nice to have.

I was thinking the same thing ;-)

short one:

redchpMK.xex

April 16

9 hours ago, Solitaire01 said:

Summarizing answers to other questions: this is otherwise a stock NTSC 130XE other than the FujiNet 1.6 or BackBit Pro carts, loading the ATR or CAR files directly from the images; no SpartaDOS, etc., etc. It always hangs at the exactly the same place: while the Atari logo is up, after screen flashes various colours, and then the top 2/3 of the logo disappears and that's where it sits.

The Atari logo is 2/3 playfield, 1/3 sprites, so it looks like the sprites stay on screen while the playfield goes bonkers. If I recall correctly it's decompressing the next effect to display (the flying sprites) which is stored in -extended memory- so it may be that you RAM is indeed bad because it would be decompressing garbage and perhaps write over the displaylist.

I do check for extended memory at startup in a very crude way by writing a byte to bank 3 and go into a red screen of death so your machine passes that test at least.

Given that both your devices fail, that would also point to RAM failure. Perhaps it is possible to flash Fujinet back to 1.5 ? Or ask the fujinet makers to test the PoP ATR ?

(Or perhaps those RAM tests will expose a problem)

April 16

On 4/13/2023 at 12:27 AM, evietron said:

Most AtariMax releases work fine, including that sampled sound demo. I think the issue might be bus noise triggering bank changes in certain cases. I'll look into it.

Given what @Solitaire01 said regarding the game crashing at the exact same spot on both fujinet and your cart, I'm guessing that's not it but in any case here's the code I use for bank switching (I'm guessing you already know)


.IF .DEF ATARIMAX_128KB
BANK_OFF		= $80
BANK_ON			= $00

ROMBankSize		= $2000
ROMBankSwitch	= $d500
ROMBankSwitchOff= $d510
.ENDIF

.IF .DEF ATARIMAX_1MB
BANK_OFF		= $80
BANK_ON			= $00

ROMBankSize		= $2000
ROMBankSwitch	= $d500
ROMBankSwitchOff= $d580
.ENDIF

.IF .DEF MEGACART
BANK_OFF		= $80
BANK_ON			= $00

ROMBankSize		= $4000
ROMBankSwitch	= $d500
ROMBankSwitchOff= $d580
.ENDIF

.IF .DEF SIC
BANK_OFF		= $40
BANK_ON			= $20

ROMBankSize		= $4000
ROMBankSwitch	= $d500
ROMBankSwitchOff= $d500
.ENDIF
  
CurrentROMBank .byte 0

; IN: X = BANK
SwitchROMBank
			pha
			txa
			stx		CurrentROMBank
			ora 	#BANK_ON
			sta 	ROMBankSwitch,x
			pla
			rts

DisableROMBank
			pha
			lda 	#BANK_OFF
			sta		CurrentROMBank
			sta 	ROMBankSwitchOff
			pla
			rts

April 12

drmtrkMK.xex extermMK.xex

April 9

A nice medley (including outrun) and more converted by your favourite squirrel!

Another cybernoid version (I prefer the PWM versions)

Nice use of PWM

botbbmk.xex nemunlmk.xex easchpMK.xex eascybmk.xex

April 9

On 4/8/2023 at 9:38 AM, evietron said:

I support MAX & MEGA banking schemes. Just updated AtariMax scheme to use 0x80 for disable. Not sure what else the issue would be, and I can't test as I only have a 64K XEGS.

Did you try any other cart image supporting any of those schemes?

I believe Atariblast would be a good test since it only requires 16KB of RAM

or the sampled sound demo by NRV:

April 8

On 4/7/2023 at 1:36 PM, flashjazzcat said:

I have no desire to perpetuate these stupid quarrels

I have nothing to add until your next relapse.

April 6

Amazing that you'd blame others for the very things that you keep doing.

Talk about torment and maturity when you've been rebashing the same XBios nonsense for so many years in possibly every thread you join (Silkworm thread being the latest)

I don't care about your loader allergies but feel free to let the world know... but find new threads to spam. If you're going to claim again that it's a bad design decision, back it up with FACTS and point to a better solution otherwise you have shit in the mouth.

On 4/5/2023 at 10:59 AM, flashjazzcat said:

LOL. Well, PoP is certainly effectively protected from ever running on Incognito, etc. Don't blame me for the fact users STILL think PoP doesn't run on this or that device on which it actually runs perfectly well. I suppose that's an inevitable result of PoP ATRs having 'certain requirements' and the CAR images initially not working on SIDE3 because of some bugs that were later fixed, but simple clarification of the situation probably isn't going to cause offense to the majority of forum members.

All I know is that with an AVG, and the ATR or CAR files loaded on a CF, it just takes booting the machine, pressing ENTER on the selected files and PoP runs without an issue. Same as every other A8 software. User friendly or original hardware is a mad requirement for sure :roll: ...

On 4/5/2023 at 10:59 AM, flashjazzcat said:

I took it off ignore, since threads (and heads) generally cool off after a few months. Boy, was I wrong.

Just put it back, your contributions will not be missed.

April 5

You eagerly keep posting nonsense in a thread you pretend to have put on ignore and given how crap your cart support was and the resulting accusations of "device protection" that followed, you're hardly the definition of sanity.

April 5

Dear troll,

Since you can't avoid posting garbage in the PoP thread, I'm just going to return it here.

Quote

You could say that, yes. A bit of skim-reading will satisfy any interested party of the solidly unarguable design decisions which resulted in that situation.

You'll be allowed to lecture me on design choices when your device is 100% compatible with all A8 software.

April 5

I'm glad I added a readme so that everybody can skip reading it :roll:

Quote

-PAL/NTSC Atari 800+incognito/600XL/800XL/1200XL/65XE/130 XE/XEGS or compatible (576NUC+/1088XEL/...)

-128KB of RAM minimum (Rambo/U1MB/...).
More RAM is fine (256KB/320KB/512KB/...) but makes no difference.

For Ultimate 1MB or Incognito BIOS, 576K CompyShop or 1088KB Rambo should be used.
Not compatible with AXLON 4MB which uses a different banking scheme.

-Megacart/SIC!/Atarimax compatible device for the CAR versions (AVG/Ultimate/SIC!/Side3/The!Cart/...).

-SD/DD disk drive (810/1050/XF551/IndusGT/...) for the disk versions or compatible device (SIO2SD/Fujinet(1.0,1.3,1.5)/SDrive/...).

The game loads at 1x SIO but HSIO can be left enabled on PBI-BIOS.
DD media needs to be formatted with standard DD sector-interleave (like SDX or DOS XL,...)

All the above configs were tested by AtariAge members at some point.

March 28

shadpkMK.xex

March 26

ice_agemk.xex

nice!

March 23

9 hours ago, Saint (Swiety) said:

Would it be possible to set the mode to force compression of all channels at once as an option?
Without setting channel stream skip bits ?
In the case of a player, e.g. for a demo, it would allow you to disable checking whether a given channel should play or not,
especially since hardly any song in the demo uses all channels at the same time

Gotta say I was a little puzzled too... but my guess is: You have a tune with an intro and a non zero looping point. During the intro, not every channel is playing causing the bitstream skip bit to be set. The main part uses all the channels which clears those skip bits.

So you're trying to get rid of the skip bit test per channel for CPU saving ? I'm sure you're aware it's not a massive saving but perhaps you're doing some fancy stereo 400hz updates

I would say it's preferable as well as quick and easy to fix it in the tune: Just insert a single note at low volume in those empty streams and they will be compressed normally.

So if you have a C#1 Instr Vol in Channel1 and nothing in the others, just do:

C#1 instr Vol-3 | C#1 instr 1 | C#1 instr 1 | C#1 instr 1

March 23

Another thing to look for is to double buffer all save/restore data

Quote

   jsr Wait_For_Sync ; Wait for VSYNC, Q quits

   jsr Flip_Screen    ; But we must be done with the blit before calling Flip_Screen  Show screenA, work with ScreenB

jsr Restore_Masks ; This blocks the 6502 until done (Bad idea!) ?? (why block ?) Restore ScreenB with old ScreenDataB using old coordDataB

    ; Calculate positions, run range checking code, flip velocity, etc.
   jsr Save_Masks save new coords into coordDataB, save new ScreenDataB
   jsr Draw_Sprites