Re: [stella] VCS.H standardization

["Erik J. Eid" <eeid@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:55 PM 11/25/01 -0800, Roger Williams wrote:
> BTW, what did the original Stella designers at Atari and their competitors 
> use?  This habit must have become enshrined in the very early days, yet 
> it's a wheel that has been reinvented several times.

I suspect they may not have had an "include file" as we know it.  It 
depends on whether their compilers (this was 10-20 years ago) supported the 
inclusion of an external file.  Also, in the earlier years, memory on the 
development system was at a premium, so source code often had minimal comments.

Of the three complete sources on the Stella Gets a New Brain CD (Communist 
Mutants, Frogger, and Suicide Mission), all have their register equates at 
the beginning of the code and none use the same format or names for all the 
memory locations.  (What we know as REFP0 is either RP1 or P0MIRR, for 
instance.)

> I'd think we should insist on a complete vcs.h that has all the registers
> describbed in the stella manual.

I agree.  It will go a long way toward eliminating some of the "I can't 
compile this" problems we encounter.

Effectively, a complete vcs.h will be like a set of published procedure and 
function calls from any high-level language's library.  In C, imagine the 
confusion if three different developers had three different names for strcmp!

> The stella manual tells us what the registers are named, so there
> is no ambiguity.  [...]  This is not the case with value constants.
> Suppose I decide P_TwoMedium should be P_2MED or P_Dbl_Med?   There is no 
> authority to say "that's wrong," so these definition files could end up 
> doing the Darwin's Finch thing.

Perhaps some members of the list could come together to be that authority, 
developing a comprehensive vcs.h that all of us could use.  To allow for 
existing programs to continue as they are, we could establish a date at 
which all new homebrews should use this header.  Since we have the 
registers handled, the only potentially sticking point will be the naming 
conventions used for the constants.  Since we're all collaborating in a 
sense already, this should not be too difficult or contentious.

Once complete, this new vcs.h (call it "stella.h" to differentiate it) 
could be placed at the archive website and on sites of homebrewers, and all 
developers would be encouraged to use it.


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