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Post by elmer on Feb 26, 2019 4:31:16 GMT
Thanks Chris!
OK, I'll assume that all of the 256 characters in the System Card font are legal in BRAM names.
I'll include an 8x12 font with the System Card's character set, and expand it to 8x16 (with drop-shadow) for displaying the BRAM filenames.
Can you work with that, Dave?
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Post by dshadoff on Feb 26, 2019 4:43:04 GMT
Sure. But I'm not sure whether the drop-shadow, or anything beyond 8x8 would actually enhance it enough to be worthwhile...
In any case, will you include a print function ?
Dave
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Post by elmer on Feb 26, 2019 5:18:40 GMT
In any case, will you include a print function ? Absolutely, that's no problem. Sure. But I'm not sure whether the drop-shadow, or anything beyond 8x8 would actually enhance it enough to be worthwhile... Well, those Katakana and Hiragana characters in the System Card font take up all 8 pixels of the tile height, so you can't put another filename on the next line, or it'll look like sh*t. Once you've decided to put the filenames on every-other-line, you might as well make it all look nicer. And anyway, everything else in the UI will use a drop-shadow ... that's part of making the UI look like it's running on a 16-bit system.
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Post by ccovell on Feb 26, 2019 14:08:57 GMT
Look, if elmer wants a drop shadow (and a variable-width font), he's gonna #$@^?!** get it, no matter what!
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Post by dshadoff on Feb 27, 2019 3:52:51 GMT
Look, if elmer wants a drop shadow (and a variable-width font), he's gonna #$@^?!** get it, no matter what! Hahaha ! Sure, if that's what he wants. That's basically why I asked the question about the "matching UI scheme".
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Post by elmer on Mar 1, 2019 6:17:50 GMT
Look, if elmer wants a drop shadow (and a variable-width font), he's gonna #$@^?!** get it, no matter what! Well, yep, that's the beauty of writing your own code ... you get to do whatever you want with it! I have to admit to being a total fanboi of drop-shadows! I don't think that there's any need to use a VWF, but I do have a 6x8 font in there at the moment, just-in-case I want to use it. I'm just not sure (yet) if the 6x8 or VWF font code would run fast-enough to avoid slowing down the whole interface. On other news, the code-cleanup continues, and I have replaced the proof-of-concept code for loading HuCards with a much faster version that loads entire file-fragments (up to the entire HuCard size) in a single read call. That has dramatically sped up the code, because it used to load every single sector separately. It is now at least as fast as the existing TED OS loader, with approx 1MB-per-second transfer rate from the SDcard. This opens up some nice possibilities for future homebrew games!
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Post by dshadoff on Mar 16, 2019 23:27:36 GMT
Say Elmer, as you're writing parts of the TED OS rewrite, could you please do me a favour ? If you are planning to chain the joypad read function to a VSYNC interrupt (as I would almost expect), please make it so that I can disable the automatic joypad scannig (with a disable byte in memory for example). If I'm going to support MB128 backup, a scan will violate the protocol and give back bad data.
Dave
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Post by elmer on Mar 17, 2019 0:28:48 GMT
If I'm going to support MB128 backup, a scan will violate the protocol and give back bad data. Sure, no problem. Or you could just disable interrupts.
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gilbot
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 137
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Post by gilbot on Mar 18, 2019 7:08:38 GMT
Sorry for th ebump and I know the problem was more or less sorted, but while it's not common to use non-alphanumeric characters in BRAM filenames, some games still did this. Steam Heart did use katakana in its save filename.
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Post by elmer on Mar 23, 2019 20:24:45 GMT
Work on the replacement OS for the Turbo Everdrive continues. All of the HuCard games that I've tried seem to work perfectly, including the obvious "problem" games like Populous and Street Fighter. The new OS automatically patches a System Card 3 image when it is loaded, so there won't be any need to give it a pre-patched version of the System Card. The System Card patch for the TED2 has been bumped up to version 3.02, which fixes a crash in Dragon Slayer II when it is run on the TED2. Here's what the main selection menu currently looks like ...
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Post by elmer on Apr 4, 2019 17:54:33 GMT
Quick question ...
While the System Card's BRAM routines are written to handle having up to 8KB of backup-ram, were any of the PC Engine or Tennokoe variants ever shipped with anything other than 2KB of backup-ram (apart from the Tennokoe Bank HuCard, which games don't directly save to).
I'm not asked about the MB128, just BRAM that's directly accessed in bank $F7.
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Post by dshadoff on Apr 4, 2019 22:44:24 GMT
In roughly 30 years, I have never heard of an official variant other than 2KB (or zero). In fact, I was shocked in around 2000 when I first heard that 8KB worked at all in emulation. I also seem to recall an edge case where 8KB was broken, but I don’t recall details.
But if you really want to triple-check validity, the first few bytes of the save memory identify the size/end address. You might want to reject invalid sizes...
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Post by elmer on Apr 5, 2019 19:53:59 GMT
Thanks!
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Post by elmer on Apr 20, 2019 19:17:58 GMT
Gawd, user-interface programming can often take longer than writing the core functionality! Nearly there ... Does anyone want to volunteer to be beta-testers?
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Post by gredler on Apr 20, 2019 20:40:42 GMT
Does anyone want to volunteer to be beta-testers? If I can help in any way I would be very happy to do so.
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