Steve Cox Posted February 11, 2018 Share Posted February 11, 2018 Check out "bold" in INFO (Q > bold from the Author Mode page.) Thanks. Also, I updated my response after you quoted it in case you missed it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted February 11, 2018 Share Posted February 11, 2018 Part of the reason the orange color was chosen should be obvious, but I would also state that output of characters in black was done to help prevent artifact coloring from happening on real crt's at the time, some of which had really horrible dot pitch, the result of which made white hard to read as a foreground color. It was and effective way to keep it legible across all displays. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
www.atarimania.com Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 I'm amazed some privileged few were able to play The Dungeon, dnd or Moria online as early as the mid-seventies, it must've been crazy! -- Atari Frog http://www.atarimania.com 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 First workable graphic display of berzerk game, shown from pterm and Atari. This is looking better than I had hoped! -Thom 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 (edited) First workable graphic display of berzerk game, shown from pterm and Atari. This is looking better than I had hoped! -Thom As I had mentioned the character at term output would look better than the greeked representation in the character editor http://atariage.com/forums/topic/196354-ataris-plato-cartridge-question/?p=3959606 Edited February 12, 2018 by _The Doctor__ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 Well, it's because I'm using the characters in BOLD mode, which causes each character to be enlarged x 2 (or 4 pixels for every 1 pixel). And yes, for everybody else watching, these are single characters uploaded into the terminal, so it draws very fast. -Thom 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 Looks excellent, and given the method used should be decently playable. Hats off to you. I'm thinking you can bold and unbold to show death happening after being hit and what ever character you've created for final death. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 Andre LaMothe on the AtariAge Facebook page asked if he could see a demonstration of writing TUTOR code on PLATO...so I made a video: Enjoy, -Thom 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nezgar Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 I seem to have stumbled upon a stress test for the Atari PLATO terminal. I wrote a quick TUTOR program that draws lines in a moire' pattern across the screen. It works fantastically at 1200 baud. At 2400, it drops lines..looks like it's saturating the buffer. -Thom Some 3rd party OS's included faster line drawing and fill routines. I wonder if that would marginally improve the draw speeds? Unless everything is done with internal code, especially since it might be drawing on two buffers at once? (Zoomed in and out) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 No OS code is used for output. -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 Another game to look at, is futurewar. Which is a first person 3D projected shoot-em-up, a precursor to DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D. -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nezgar Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 PDF'ing the MPP-1000E modem manual tonight, I came across these passages: In the introduction: And a Q/A on page 25: 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 And that's part of the slow down, as it's bit banging the joystick port. There is a good deal of work to do. What was thought to be ingenious at the time or helpful can be a hindrance later. I've long wanted to build a flow control buffer for such modems and convert/put them on the 850, MIO, P:R: connection etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
evilmoo Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 PDF'ing the MPP-1000E modem manual tonight, I came across these passages: From what's been disassembled so far: LB925: RString "Microbit 300 baud" 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
16kRAM Posted February 15, 2018 Share Posted February 15, 2018 PDF'ing the MPP-1000E modem manual tonight, I came across these passages: In the introduction: intro.jpg And a Q/A on page 25: P25 Q12.jpg While working on the disassembly, I had a hunch that the Microbits code might've been borrowed from MPP. Turns out the source code found between addresses A0AC to A1CF (Pages 7-9) of the Smart Term 4.1 cartridge were nearly copy/pasted into the Learning Phone. https://archive.org/details/MPPSmartTerminalv4.1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
16kRAM Posted February 15, 2018 Share Posted February 15, 2018 While working on the disassembly, I had a hunch that the Microbits code might've been borrowed from MPP. Turns out the source code found between addresses A0AC to A1CF (Pages 7-9) of the Smart Term 4.1 cartridge were nearly copy/pasted into the Learning Phone. https://archive.org/details/MPPSmartTerminalv4.1 Here's a link to the code found in The Learning Phone. https://github.com/michaelsternberg/tlp/blob/50aada8a8fe7c7673f9b7feeb48bbd47c2647d04/tlp.asm#L3587 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 15, 2018 Share Posted February 15, 2018 This is coming along BEAUTIFULLY! -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 Anyone else jumping on? I noticed Brentarian, and tried to term talk him a few times and leave a note, but no dice. -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 Anyone else jumping on? I noticed Brentarian, and tried to term talk him a few times and leave a note, but no dice. -Thom I have a log on, unfortunately haven't had time to test it yet. I have Monday off, perhaps I'll have some free time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 (edited) It is for the most part what it should be, but there's a bit to go. I'm pretty sure based on how and where the serial code sits the MIO's self inserted serial will not work or black box for that matter... I'll put the rom in an ultimate again, and try each... flow control would be nice in combination with a buffer in the modem(lantronix or otherwise) Edited February 16, 2018 by _The Doctor__ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 Well, PLATO does do software flow control (there is a sequence called CATCHUP which causes the formatter at PLATO's end to stop sending data until a subsequent CAUGHTUP sequence is received, much like XON/XOFF), this needs proper implementation in the cartridge, as well as a larger input buffer. The disassembly is progressing on github, I already know we can rip the MPP modem code out, so that we can gain some bytes, and we should be able to add a check to see if R is already in HATABS, this could be done if we altered the cartridge to boot the disk first, but it would ultimately mean that we'd either have to do two versions of the cart, with 850 bootstrap support, and without...or something similar. Really need more eyes looking @ the code. -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 on the disassembly front, looks like more of the SIO routines have been documented. Still going. I'll be taking another pass at it this evening. -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
evilmoo Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 on the disassembly front, looks like more of the SIO routines have been documented. Still going. I'll be taking another pass at it this evening. Is there a comprehensive PLATO protocol or terminal definition somewhere? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 Yes, and I had it.. I can't find it atm... So in lieu of that, I am looking at the pterm source code: https://cyber1.org/download/linux/pterm-5.0.8.tar.bz2(I am looking @ it because I want to write an android terminal) -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 Just found the ASCII protocol documentation, it's in lesson s0ascers -Thom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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