Forum comments in chronological order

Anonymous
Thu 7-Apr-2022 04:55

I was wondering if it's possible to use Spindle as a general purpose fastloader with autorun capabilities? For example: Say I wanted a single program to run, output a disk image with the fastloader stub+main program which the stub will autoload and run an independent program not a demo or part.

Anonymous
Wed 20-Apr-2022 05:25

I never tried it hoping that it would one day run on the venerable c64. Do you perhaps still consider to try to figure out a way to transcend the "more-than-one-disk-side-size-limitation"?

lft
Linus Åkesson
Wed 20-Apr-2022 08:23

By a curious coincidence I've started to think about this in the last week or so. Adding multi-side support to the interpreter is one approach, but I suspect the game would still run quite slowly because it needs a lot of RAM to store state, leaving less RAM for paging. So I think it's better to try to shrink the code footprint by improving the compiler. I have some ideas...

lft
Linus Åkesson
Wed 20-Apr-2022 08:30

Hmm, the short answer is no, but you could probably hack something together. If it's a machine code program, starting with a BASIC header with just a SYS instruction, you could make a Spin script for loading that to $801 and supplying the SYS parameter (in hex) with the -e option. But the program would find the machine in a different state compared to a clean BASIC start, so you may have to jump via a small program of your own devising that restores enough of the environment to make the target program work. That may require investigation with a monitor/debugger.

Anonymous
Thu 21-Apr-2022 19:15

Great article!

quiss
Matthias Kramm
Thu 21-Apr-2022 19:28

What's "repeat last"?

Anonymous
Sat 23-Apr-2022 15:02

On the last line of a character row, where RC = 7, you can trick the VIC chip into keeping RC at 7. In the first half of cycle 58, if RC is 7, VIC goes into idle mode. Then, under normal circumstances, the following line is a badline (which will set RC to 0 on cycle 14, among other things). But we can write YPOS (in d011) to trigger a badline after the first half of cycle 58. Then, on the following line (which is now *not* a badline), VIC is in display mode but RC remains 7.

In char mode, this will repeat the last line of the currently loaded characters, and the trick can be repeated for every rasterline. By switching font and VIC banks, this can be used for FPP effects without wasting cycles on new fetches, but the downside compared to regular FPP is that you only have a limited number of banks available.

Anonymous
Sat 23-Apr-2022 15:08

I'll add that this is essentially a way to do linecrunch by triggering a badline very late on a rasterline, instead of removing the badline condition very early on the following rasterline. Either method may be preferable in a given situation, e.g. due to sprite DMA timing.

Anonymous
Mon 25-Apr-2022 07:55

Fantastic stuff!!

Thank you for writing it.

Anonymous
Mon 25-Apr-2022 11:14

Thank god for the minor mistakes! If it was an exact replica of the original we would be in a very disturbing Pierre Ménard situation.

Anonymous
Wed 27-Apr-2022 15:57

This is by far the best tty article to be found on the web. Thanks!

Anonymous
Fri 29-Apr-2022 15:16

Have you considered to rewrite the chipophone and thus get new features on a more powerful, yet cheap processor like the STM32F103 (Blue Pill boards) ?