Proto #2 support in GitHub ROM, Emulator & Documentation

desertfish · Post by **desertfish** » Sat Mar 27, 2021 9:35 pm

Found only 1 issue so far, which turned out to be a bug in my own code (in the file based assembler - fixed now): it was reading $0000 sometimes by mistake, which happened to work before because that used to contain zero. But in v39 it is no longer zero.

BruceMcF · Post by **BruceMcF** » Sun Mar 28, 2021 4:49 am

10 hours ago, ZeroByte said:

This is not a feature request or a complaint about functionality - I would just like to know so that I can plan accordingly in my projects - is there any intention for the functionality of the Kernal LOAD/SAVE routines to have a mode where the first 2 bytes of a file are not skipped when loading into RAM/VERA/HIRAM?

Or, in other words, for the LOAD and SAVE routines to work with SEQ files in addition to PRG files. If it doesn't start with a load address, it is not a PRG file.

I think it would have to be a feature request for LOAD to load sequential files. It would have to query whether the file IS a PRG or a SEQ file, and it would either have to be an error if you tried to load a sequential file in mode 1, or better it loads to the HighRAM window under the current bank if you load a sequential file in mode 1.

As far as Saving SEQ files, I think that would be better to just do it in the current API (though AFAIU not all of the pieces are fully implemented): create the file as a SEQ file, open it in a channel for writing, and write the bytes one after another to the channel you have opened. LOAD could well find out that a file is a SEQ file, not a PRG file, but SAVE would need to be told, and the game is probably not worth the candle since those will often be things like game data files that are loaded a lot more than they are saved.

ZeroByte · Post by **ZeroByte** » Sun Mar 28, 2021 9:30 pm

On 3/27/2021 at 2:45 PM, Elektron72 said:

I believe ZeroByte is referring to a mode that would actually load the first two bytes as data.

That's exactly what I mean. Even if the Kernal's LOAD/SAVE are always going to { use+skip | ignore+skip } the 2 "header bytes", doing it yourself isn't that hard. One workaround would be to read the first two bytes individually using OPEN mechanics, and then using load to do the rest with $base+0x02 as the target...

p.s.: I would rather LOAD supported not skipping the bytes tho. ?

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Mon Mar 29, 2021 5:25 pm

Is there an official release of the emulator, or will I need to compile it? The latest release seems to be "Kyoto", from last August.

ZeroByte · Post by **ZeroByte** » Mon Mar 29, 2021 5:35 pm

5 minutes ago, TomXP411 said:

Is there an official release of the emulator, or will I need to compile it? The latest release seems to be "Kyoto", from last August.

The main branch is the current in-development code. It's the "bleeding edge" version, and you must build it yourself. The release version is still R38.

Speaking of which - I noticed a pull request in the main branch to fix the YM2151 audio frequency - the fix is wrong and should not be used. It should be set to 3.579545 MHz. The pull request has doubled this value.

Michael Steil · Post by **Michael Steil** » Mon Mar 29, 2021 5:41 pm

5 minutes ago, ZeroByte said:

Speaking of which - I noticed a pull request in the main branch to fix the YM2151 audio frequency - the fix is wrong and should not be used. It should be set to 3.579545 MHz. The pull request has doubled this value.

Can you please put this comment into the pull request on GitHub? Thanks!

Michael Steil · Post by **Michael Steil** » Mon Mar 29, 2021 5:52 pm

26 minutes ago, TomXP411 said:

Is there an official release of the emulator, or will I need to compile it? The latest release seems to be "Kyoto", from last August.

I am planning the r39 release for this weekend.

ZeroByte · Post by **ZeroByte** » Mon Mar 29, 2021 5:56 pm

12 minutes ago, Michael Steil said:

Can you please put this comment into the pull request on GitHub? Thanks!

I did add to the comment thread on the pull request last night when I noticed it. It's pull request #241 and my comment there is under the username ZeroByteOrg

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Mon Mar 29, 2021 7:02 pm

1 hour ago, Michael Steil said:

I am planning the r39 release for this weekend.

Thanks.

I was trying to build it myself, but not having much luck. I don't know which build tools I need for Windows, and the Visual Studio project I have doesn't build the current version of the emulator. If anyone else has built this on Windows, it might be nice to add a "How to build on Windows" doc to the repository.

ZeroByte · Post by **ZeroByte** » Mon Mar 29, 2021 7:36 pm

I used to cross build it on a Linux VM. I had to keep a cross built SDL library to do it.