Re: New game: Loonies 8192 (386+, VGA, OPL-2)

Posted on 2018-07-23, 20:44

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Do it! It's not that hard and soooo much more efficient with the page flipping. You just have to rethink your redraw code. You only have to redraw small portions of your game screen anyway.Pixel plotting can be wrapped in a small macro or inline function, due to the weird addressing in mode X. I …

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Re: New game: Loonies 8192 (386+, VGA, OPL-2)

Posted on 2018-07-23, 18:49

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Wait... are you using Mode X with multiple pages? Then you can double buffer without rep mov. Much more efficient. But requires a bit more complicated drawing routines. No, I'm just using plain mode 13h chained mode at the moment. Maybe I'll make the switch to Mode X, but it's a bit more …

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Re: New game: Loonies 8192 (386+, VGA, OPL-2)

Posted on 2018-07-23, 16:11

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm starting to wonder if the palette updates or the VGA-waiting might be causing slowdowns. Or if in the case of your card, if the VGA memory is just really slow and with all the cycle eaters, it might be more performant to double-buffer the screen and then just "rep movsd" it to the VGA …

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Re: How hard would it be to make a CGA card?

Posted on 2018-07-23, 12:27

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

If you're not bothered about the colours being accurate and you have (or find) a CGA card with an RGBI output, it's a pretty simple circuit to go from RGBI to monochrome composite. I have a card with a 9 pin female output (and an LPT port). not sure what is it.. it drives a monochrome monitor with …

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Re: How hard would it be to make a CGA card?

Posted on 2018-07-23, 11:38

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Also, as a hobbyist, soldering the card myself would be great. Hence doing "everything in a FPGA" is not very appealing. I think CPC FPGA was hand-soldered so it's not unprecedented. Not the easiest thing to solder though. Well, of course that is possible. But for me, hand soldering is most fun …

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Re: How hard would it be to make a CGA card?

Posted on 2018-07-23, 11:00

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The thing that makes CGA interesting is probably the composite color mode. However this only works in NTSC, so us Europeans are already not that much interested. Hence a CGA card for me would only be interesting if it would already do the composite->NTSC conversion on board, outputting either PAL …

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Re: How hard would it be to make a CGA card?

Posted on 2018-07-22, 19:06

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

After dipping my toes in building my own retro card, with the Adlib clone, I wonder how complicated would it be to create a CGA card from scratch? I'm not an electronics expert (pff not even a beginner..) but it seems that the only "proprietary" part would be a ROM chip with the BIOS/Character map …

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Re: Modern Gamepad on Gameport?

Posted on 2018-07-21, 18:14

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Even better if there also was a converter to other old 9 pin joystick porta. E.g. I want a new gamepad for my Genesis... The Genesis had good pads available for it. The good ones are among the best d-pad controller ever made. Emulating a d-pad with a modern analog controller can only be terrible, …

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Re: Modern Gamepad on Gameport?

Posted on 2018-07-21, 12:33

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Serioulsy, nobody else want's to use modern Joysticks/Gamepads on old computers? Just did the same search and I’m really surprised that no one has anything for this. I’d love to use modern gamepads like an Xbox One controller with my old PCs. Most ideally a converter for this would also have a pass …

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Re: Expert (WD Paradise) 2300H Vga card upgrade

Posted on 2018-07-21, 08:02

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by root42

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Hi, the WD90C00 chip is comparable to the PVGA1A or PVGA1B chip, I think. At least software wise it's very close. From what I've seen, the old PVG1A drivers do work fine on the WD90C00, too. Same goes for the 800x600 SVGA video mode. I'm speaking under correction, but 512KiB should be possible with …

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Re: BlasterBoard 2.0 : A modern SB 2.0-compatible ISA sound card

Posted on 2018-07-20, 18:44

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by root42

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Would it be hard to implement a digital out? Maybe just as a header on the board? I know it's not really necessary for the kind of tech we are dealing with but I'm still interested in how much audio quality one can get out of such a chip using a big homping hifi amp :) The OPL has digital output …

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Re: BlasterBoard 2.0 : A modern SB 2.0-compatible ISA sound card

Posted on 2018-07-20, 17:04

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yes, BlissBoard is a much better name!

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Re: Voodoo2 8 to 12MB RAM upgrade - is it really that straightforward?

Posted on 2018-07-19, 13:59

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Well I've ordered the parts, will have to wait a few weeks for the chips to arrive from China but fingers crossed it works! I can't see any reason why it shouldn't because I've compared images of my 8MB card to the 12MB model and everything is literally identical, save for the physical RAM chips …

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Re: Voodoo2 8 to 12MB RAM upgrade - is it really that straightforward?

Posted on 2018-07-19, 09:28

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by root42

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The Serpent Rider wrote: Should work just fine. There's literally zero difference between 8mb and 12mb versions. No, *literally* there is 4MiB difference between the two different versions. 😉

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Re: New game: Loonies 8192 (386+, VGA, OPL-2)

Posted on 2018-07-18, 21:10

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Here's a 8086-compatible build (the "normal" builds are usually 80386 builds), r28 should work on any x86, and it should work without EMU386, maybe that brings some performance boost. Did you set your MT-32 to map the channels so that the first channel is also used? I read somewhere that by default …

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Re: New game: Loonies 8192 (386+, VGA, OPL-2)

Posted on 2018-07-18, 20:36

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Nope, neither version works for me. I do not get anything. It just gets stuck in a newline on the DOS prompt.

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Re: New game: Loonies 8192 (386+, VGA, OPL-2)

Posted on 2018-07-18, 20:31

by

by root42

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Attached is Loonies r27, with these additions: Support for SBMIDI on port 0x220 or 0x240 (selectable at startup) "Optimized" drawing loop for the background effects (might or might not help..) Slow/fast machine speed selection, which disables some expensive drawing The slow machine speed mode …

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Re: What maintenance on SC-55?

Posted on 2018-07-18, 19:09

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by root42

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Dominus wrote: Sadly I'm moving and put everything in the storage boxes already. Otherwise I'd be ideal (on OS X and having a Sc55,mt32 and cm64) Sorry, but the move has been canceled!

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Re: What maintenance on SC-55?

Posted on 2018-07-18, 18:38

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The GS mode doesn't sound right at all. Are you sure you don't have something else loaded up that could be overriding all of this? I also believe in the ScummVM setup that I have to select it to use my UM-ONE as the midi device or I use Windows Midi but then use another program to set my windows …

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Re: BlasterBoard 2.0 : A modern SB 2.0-compatible ISA sound card

Posted on 2018-07-18, 13:37

by

by root42

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I am totally for a SB2.0 clone at this stage. Keep it simple. Learn from this project, and maybe you can later make a SBPro clone. But with SB2.0 compatibility you will already be able to play virtually all games that support AdLib or SoundBlaster. It is just a matter of fidelity (stereo / 16Bit if …

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