A Programming CHALLENGE

[chewy]

On 8/28/2016 at 10:44 AM, SpiceWare said:

With Bus Stuffing we can now create displays with 18 unique background colors per scanline.

 

NTSC

 

 

 

PAL60:

 

 

Sadly the parrot image never uses 18 unique colors per scanline, so here's a color bar test pattern:

 

NOTE: At this time you can only run these on real hardware using a Harmony cartridge. The specs for BUS are not finalized, once we've done that I'll be submitting BUS support for Stella to stephena. It's probably the spec will change enough that these won't work when Stella officially supports BUS, but since the driver is part of the ROM they'll always work on the Harmony.

 

WARNING: While we don't expect any problems, I've been testing this on my own system after all, this code is potentially dangerous to the Atari. As such, run it at your own risk.

parrot_bus_NTSC.bin

32 kB · 85 downloads

parrot_bus_PAL.bin 32 kB · 63 downloads

test_bus_NTSC.bin 32 kB · 62 downloads

its possible to write "dangerous code"? like a game when you mess up it destroys your atari?

[+Andrew Davie]

51 minutes ago, chewy said:

its possible to write "dangerous code"? like a game when you mess up it destroys your atari?

Ask @ZeroPage Homebrew about "rage quit" - he's highly experienced with the dangers to hardware...

[Bomberman94]

5 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:

Ask @ZeroPage Homebrew about "rage quit" - he's highly experienced with the dangers to hardware...

Seriously - it can destroy my Atari? ?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

4 minutes ago, Bomberman94 said:

Seriously - it can destroy my Atari? ?

Not without using extra hardware.

[Bomberman94]

Just now, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Not without using extra hardware.

So, executing this bin with my Harmony cartridge on an unmodified Atari 2600 causes no damage? ?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Harmony is extra hardware.  

[+SpiceWare]

10 hours ago, chewy said:

its possible to write "dangerous code"? like a game when you mess up it destroys your atari?

 

The disclaimer was a CYA as we were exploring new territory^*, it wasn't because we though it would destroy your Atari; after all, we'd tested it out on numerous systems of our own before posting it.

 

Also,  @batari did some testing before we pursued bus stuffing. While the CPU's temperature increased a little bit it stayed well within tolerance levels. You can read about that on the first page of this topic:

 

 

 

^* it wasn't really new territory, it was just new to us. As seen in the above topic Bus Stuffing was going to be used back in the 80s for The Graduate.  The link in that topic to The Graduate info is dead, but you can view an archive of it via Wayback Machine.