Subject: Re: [stella] Stella sequencing From: Nick S Bensema <nickb@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 17:00:11 -0700 (MST) |
> > Well, in the aspect of this question of yours, since emulators probably provide > > "unlimited" resources, such as RAM (if need be), it may obscure (or even cover > > up) blatant programming mistakes that would seize fast on a real VCS. (I > > actually don't have the data to say for certain, however, since so many > > incarnations of VCS runtime envrionments exist, I imagine Stella and other > > emulators "can provide" tons more than 128 bytes of RAM and 4k of ROM, etc. > > Most of the emulators do support up to 32k bankswitched ROM images, but > then so does the real VCS. But they won't supply any more than that or > 128 bytes of RAM to the program code - that's the point of emulation. I imagine the emulator could be reprogrammed to have addressable RAM at, say, $0400-$0FFF, just so that programmers could experiment with what would be possible if the 2600 had that much memory. But, come on, how useful would that be? It would become an emulator for a system that does not exist, and is still a pain to program for. Even if one could modify existing 2600 machines to do the same thing, that would probably too huge of a hardware project to become widespread. It would be easier to enhance the 2600's capabilities based on the ingenious things people have done with the cartridge port, such as the Pitfall II custom chips, Supercharger RAM, or that little squitch of RAM included in some 16K cartridges. And current emulators already support all of these enhancements, though nobody right now is programming new games with them (especially the Pitfall II chip), probably because it's so hard to make a physical cartridge with more than the stock 4K in one's garage. -- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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