Hello Andrew,
> Well, the response hasn't exactly been overwhelming... but, plunging on...
> Please find attached the latest work-in-progress. This is semi-playable,
in
> that you can actually move the blocks to the correct positions. I've also
> got a couple of rudimentary sprites up. This demo works in PCAE, but the
> sprites are mispositioned in Z26. Could somebody please let me know how
it
> goes on actual hardware?
> I have about 10 bytes of free RAM, and about 1200 bytes of ROM.
If this demo works in PCAE, you must be using a pretty old version of
this emulator. I tried PUSH.BIN on my 7800 and the sprite positioning
is totally off too. After looking at the z26 trace log, I think the
problem is a little misunderstanding on your part about how object
postioning works on the VCS.
If you want to position an object on the VCS, you have to wait for
the start of a scanline. Then you have to do a delay loop until the
electron beam reaches the horizontal postion, where you want to
display your object. Then you have to access the RESxx register
for the object, that you want to position.
Due to the fact that each cycle represents three pixels, you can't
position an object on any pixel with RESxx alone. Therefore you now
have to shift your object a couple of pixels to the left or right,
if nessessary. To do that you have to write the apropriate shifting
value into the HMxx of the desired object. Then you have to wait for
the start of a scanline again. Then you have to access HMOVE which
will apply the fine movement to all objects at the same time. Now
you have to wait at least 24 cycles before you can write to any of the
fine movement registers again, including HMCLR. If you don't access
HMOVE directly at the start of a scanline, or if you access any of the
movement registers too soon after the access to HMOVE you will get
strange positions for your objects.
So a routine to position two players could look like this.
sta WSYNC
ldx player_0_X_position
lda position_value_table,x
sta HMP0
and #$0f
tax
L1:
dex
bpl L1
sta RESP0
sta WSYNC
ldx player_1_X_position
lda position_value_table,x
sta HMP1
and #$0f
tax
L1:
dex
bpl L1
sta RESP1
sta WSYNC
sta HMOVE
sta WSYNC
sta HMCLR
position_value_table contains for each desired horizontal position
the appropriate delay loop counter in the low nibbles and the
appropriate horizontal shift value in the hich nibbles.
One other thing that I noticed on your demo is, that it only does about
249 scanlines per frame, and every couple of scanlines there is a frame
where you do a different number of scanlines, so that the screen jumps.
Z26 displays the number of scanlines in the last completed frame, when
you start it with the -n command line switch. This could help you to
generate a proper display.
Also you should do a STA WSYNC before you turn on VSYNC. Otherwise you
might turn on VSYNC at the end of a scanline and therefore do only
2 scanlines of VSYNC effectively.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
-
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
