Monday, November 27, 2006

XeO3: Pausing to gather our thoughts...

Yes I know... I've not done much XeO3 stuff for a while. I'm actually busy learning electronics, something I've always wanted to do but never found the time (or books) to learn. However, I've now gotten some of these so I'm trying to learn the fundamentals just now and that takes time... time that would normally be spent on XeO3. This has of course given rise to some new possibilities. The whole reason for learning this stuff is so that I can build add-on's for my retro machines, and we're currently wondering if you can build a retro game cartridge cheaply enough that people would buy XeO3 as a cartridge..... Anyway, this is all a sideline just now...The new cache system still has a nasty bug in it and is currently corrupting memory, so I'll have to track that down soon, and then try and tackle the weapons system....so once I get over the initial electronics hurdle, I'll be back on XeO3.....honest :)

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Boooh! :_(
And you leave me in pain because I dunno how to build the 2nd level, because of all my doubts about animation, new features and so on!
Maybe it's time to fold on the 2nd lvl's tune, instead of completing an unsure level...

Mike said...

Well, I still say building a level is 90% ofthe work, and adding animations and touches are the other 10%

So you should be able to build most of the level.

But we'll need music too so its up to you :)

Anonymous said...

90% of my time on a project are pauses used to continue other projects ;) Sometimes pauses are good and help you see the project more clearly again, sometimes you lose focus and have to do extra work to get back on track when you continue. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but as long as you get some work done every now and then there is a chance that projects finish one day.

(Guess what I just started? ATmega16 board on IEC bus, feeding data from MMC/SD card with custom protocol :)

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TNT

Mike said...

I know what you mean. We're currently trying to build a huge scrolly message board, but to do that I have to learn what plugs where and why. This stuff can take time, but in the end I hope I'll be able to build some nice toys for the PLus/4 and C64.

Is that a "1541 III"?

I need to stock up on some basics before I can actually play with this stuff properly, the most I've managed so far is to hook up some LED's to the user port... :(

I want to get a LED Matrix hooked up to a user port though, that should be more interesting.....

Anonymous said...

Not 1541 III, neither uIEC. I know there are other, better projects so this is just to satisfy my curiosity with the evaluation board we teach students with. (Sheesh, kids today. When I was young we didn't have any boards... etc ;)

I don't plan implementing either CBM serial protocol or FAT16, let alone virtual D64 drive, so it's just dumb sector access device. C64 sends sector to ATMega16, it reads sector from memory card and sends it back to C64. Depending on transfer method I get 8-20 KBps read speed.

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TNT

Mike said...

Fat16 is really simple, so if/when I do one, I'll stick to that. I'm still looking at MMC and Compact flash, but I suspect compact flash would be much quicker since you could do it 8bits at a time.

I think having a ROM on board with a boot loader that loads a browser from the device is probably best, and then use the ROM to actually load it in. Makes it pretty upgradable. Load/Save/Erase file/Directory etc. in ROM, and anything else in the browser.

Anonymous said...

I've already done FAT16 with MMC64 browser, so converting it to AVR assembly teaches me nothing. I'd better use my time better than compete with other similar projects.

If you do all the work with C64 or plus/4 then parallel memory will be faster. But if you add PIC or some other microcontroller then it can read data from MMC/SD faster than computer can read it. MMC64 reads almost one byte per cycle. Too bad it just misses the cycle/byte mark, that means one can't use REU DMA to read/write data really fast. (If you add fast enough uC, you can of course add DMA capability yourself ;)

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TNT

Mike said...

Might be a while till I do that kind of thing...still learning... :)

Anonymous said...

But doesn't the idea of your own DMA design sound nice? :)

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TNT

Mike said...

"But doesn't the idea of your own DMA design sound nice? :)"


Oooooo..ooouuuch.that's bad.... I should ban you for quip's like that!!

:)

Mike said...

How on earth did you manage that? Did you just plug bare wires into the machine to try and make it go faster??!?!?

.....I guess it worked...briefly....

Anonymous said...

Mike, Luca is a real enthusiast for your game - from my own experience I know that these people are hard to find for homebrew projects.

So don't let the opportunity slip!