The #MINDSET's BLITTER can also be used for fast text output of a custom font at any pixel position. It took me a significant amount of time to figure out how the SET FONT POINTER and BLT STRING routines worked, because the documentation left out very critical details, and my initial assumptions …

I figured out in a nutshell what's going on: The fonts aren't monochrome, they have to be in the target graphics mode format, which in my case is 320x200x16 and the pixels are arranged thusly: 7---4 3---0 XXXX YYYY where X and Y are palette indices (0-F), so two pixels of color F are 0xFF And the …

Ok, the one remaining buggerboo in the graphics library is trying to call BLT STRING to output custom font data. It's described here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mindset/Mindset_Software_Developers_Guide.pdf page 4-70 for SET FONT POINTER page 4-73 for BLT STRING and the code I am doing to exercise …

Here is a completed "Scene" doing blitter animation, based on the PAC-MAN intermissions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE8ieFNSpJM Code is here: https://github.com/tschak909/mindset-examples/blob/master/pacman-cutscene/main.c Note that it has no problem moving big blits nice and smoothly. :) -Thom

MAME rom sets for latest release can be found with a bit of sleuthing. the machine driver is 'mindset' Right now, the best way to get any of this working is to check out a copy of MAME from git, and build it yourself. -Thom

As I said, the Mindset emulation is complete enough that I am actually able to do real development work with it. The only currently majorly missing feature is sound (and support for the interlaced modes) -Thom

The #MINDSET can attach a handler to the display interrupt, on one of any scanline on screen. This allows a nice 60Hz timing for handling sound or animation. Shown here is a simple demo that changes the color palette for one color palette entry every 1/60th of a second. vbi.gif The code is here: …

All sorts of useful info here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mindset/Mindset_Software_Developers_Guide.pdf The entire graphics subsystem is explained in chapter 4. Some modes are double buffered (the 2 and 4 color modes for 320x200 and 640x200.. the interlaced 640x400 mode does not have such an …

Believe me, I know. I've been knee deep in virtually everything about this system, for a bit now.. ;) I'm trying to both document this machine to a wider audience (Demos are BEGGING to be written for this system), and try to show how little this machine was actually explored. The vast majority of …

oh wow *smack-head* thanks 😀 I've been writing a whole host of test programs trying to document the hardware, and I guess I've just been at the keyboard too long 😀 Here it is running on actual hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6G7HrCC3cI Keep in mind, the CPU is a 6MHz 80186. 😉 -Thom

Hello everyone, I've recently borrowed a Mindset computer, for the purpose of writing new software for it, and am writing it in Watcom C 1.9. Currently set to generate 80186 instructions, with texan optimizations. Thus far, I have brought up a copy of PLATOTERM on the system: https://www.youtube.com …