FW:
http://grandkobayashi.sakura.ne.jp/5bxcuo.php
Re: Essential Sam Goodies
Welcome Graeme! The Sam's as good 21 years later as it was Christmas 1990. We're generally cheerful too btw. Your best bet to find the best goodies is to visit World of Sam and have a damn good root around! Simcoupe itself is bundled with what I would call the best stuff, but you'll need a few things to port the PC images back to real floppies, namely SAMdisk (by Si Owen) and a PC with an INTERNAL 3.5 floppy drive (external won't do). Also have a good look round Andrew Collier's Intensity site because there's loads of great bits locked away. As for other stuff to get, I'd advise the Atom HDD, Stratosphere, Defender, Momentum, Lemmings, Protracker, E-tracker, SAMpaint, GI-mon, Comet, Pyz80, some kind of SAMdac or EDDAc, SAM mouse, and every diskzine you can get your hands on! There's just LOADS of great stuff available. What did I miss? Howard (aka Balor Price, Tobermory Womble or whatever else) --Original Message-- From: Graeme Gregory Sender: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no ReplyTo: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Essential Sam Goodies Sent: 12 Apr 2012 11:19 Ok, to change the topic from current discussion lately ;-) I am a newbie to the Sam world, I bought a machine on ebay as a whim and to reach one of my childhood dreams of owning one. As a kid I could not afford one and by the time I had $$$ Sam had dissapeared and it was time for Uni. So I now have this lovely Sam Coupe with 1.5 working drives and 512K of memory. What games/demos/widgets should I be getting for it. Would be good to give this machine as much love as my collection of spectrums and zx81 get! Graeme Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2
Fw: Yet more junk mail
Yes messages today and still more coming in right now. Behold... Okay so my real genuine opinion is that he may be autistic. And as such I'm just going to block everything that comes along. I'm not even considering educating him or having an argument. Anyway, being a bit positive here, you might like to have a gander at my half-finished conversion of XOR. My guess it'll be a week or two til it's ready for proper. Cheer up chaps it can't go on forever. I hope. Http://cookingcircle.tumblr.com Howard Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2 -Original Message- From: WAYN invitat...@whereareyounow.net Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:45:15 To: Balor Pricetoberm...@cookingcircle.co.uk Subject: Roger Jowett has left a message for you Hi Balor, Roger Jowett has left you a message on WAYN. Read message: http://www.wayn.com/-/30692-133h4uz?invite_token=kgig2v-cn5e2oje2kpl3 All the best, The WAYN Team To stop receiving invite requests from Roger Jowett, click here: http://www.wayn.com/-/30586-133h4uz?m=22419144c=688472159 To stop receiving any notifications from WAYN, click here: http://www.wayn.com/-/30587-133h4uz?c=688472159
Re: Re: Junk mail
Yup me too. I reported it as well. Think Gmail would pay attention if more than one report about the same account comes in simultaneously?I just don't understand the logic: he's been told in clear terms not to spam the sam-users list, so he does a query on the postmaster to get all our individual addresses, then sends me 125 attachments followed by 6-10 'recommendations' for some internet speedup software. So delicate question: Is he ill? Very aggressive? The best troller in the world?Howard On Apr 4, 2012, Andrew Gillen a...@joua.net wrote: No, second time I've been mail bombed by him in as many weeks. The first was a mail of 21MB, then tonight 40 odd individual mails plus one of 8MB.Every single one forwarded to ab...@gmail.com. I know they'll do nothing, but we can dream, right?--From: da...@properbastard.co.ukSent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 11:39 PMTo: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.noSubject: Junk mail Was it just me who was sent a huge number of un-requested files? I've added the sender to my email blacklist.
Re: New Game - Dave Invaders
Oh well done!!! I didn't think I'd ever read another message like this, Sam's a great platform to hone your skills. *waiting impatiently for work to finish so I can try it* Howard Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2 -Original Message- From: Andrew Gillen a...@joua.net Sender: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:49:30 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: New Game - Dave Invaders Hi folks I've finished writing my first game for the SAM. In fact it is pretty much the first game I've ever programmed in assembler (certainly on the SAM anyway) . I've tinkered with various high level languages over the years but have nothing to show for it. You can grab it from this rather minimalist website: http://www.joua.net/ You need a 512KB SAM for it (although when playing it you'd be forgiven for asking why..). Just a run of the mill single screen platfomer, really, but I appreciate any feed back. I've learned a heck of a lot of the year programming it and should be taking the experience gained to improve my skills (what skills?!) when tackling new projects which will be forthcoming! If you find the frame rate somewhat lacking on some levels then you can turn off the music (e-tracker mods) to gain some processing time. Or just turn it off anyway of course if you don't like it! Anyway, enjoy. Cheers Andrew.
Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
Hi Dicky I remember this question from a few months back, especially because I've run out of space in my half height PC case too. The USB floppy drives simply aren't sophisticated enough to read non-standard disks, and never will be able to either. In order to run SamDisk you need to install an extra dll (I think?) to converse with the floppy drive controller, and that isn't connected with a USB port. Sorry about that! Howard Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -Original Message- From: Dicky Moore dickymo...@gmail.com Sender: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:38:26 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive Hey all Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk or .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? Samdisk doesn't support USB floppy drives and I'm not sure of any other software that can do this. I'm trying to recover all the E-tracker music I created back in the day. I'm trying to find an app that will make an image of the floppy disk, which then I maybe could mount that as a virtual floppy drive and samdisk could then work. No luck so far. Anyone have any ideas? Cheers Dicky -- Dicky Moore | Bearcraft 07702 100 180 http://dickymoore.co.uk/ http://dickymoore.co.uk | http://bearcraftmusic.com/ http://bearcraftmusic.com
RE: Thinking aloud on polygon filling
No expert here! Just my two cents. I considered both your Ideas 1 and 2, both came out to be more expensive with maintenance than I wanted. Especially Idea 1 (which is a basic space partitioning tree), the masks are very inefficient when you have many overlapping/joining polygons in the same 8*8 pix square. This happens an awful lot for objects in the distance, I ended up having to redraw to the same 8*8 square many times. As I'm heavily using the stack pointer to draw to the screen I wanted to render the whole object right-to-left line-by-line. Like Braben, I'm using convex polys and convex objects only. (This isn't a problem when you can glue convex objects together afterwards). For each object, there are two kinds of mask to use - (A) one at the left and right sides of the object, ie the background meets the object here, and (B) where the polys on the object meet each other in the middle. (A) is done traditionally, with a bitwise-mask to ensure crisp edges. (B) only has 4 or 5 different flavours so is hardcoded. I use a 'shared points' system to ensure calculations on points and vertices are only done once, this helps ordering the rendering process as well, so I know which polygons I'm rendering on each line. In the end the code looks a bit like this: Render: PUSH HL ;Poly 1 - 4 bytes per push. Mmm, efficient-y. PUSH HL ... PUSH DE ;Joining bit PUSH BC ;Poly 2 PUSH BC ... I'm still having problems with digesting (B)-type joins when the polys are small (less than 4 pixels), but it seems to be quite efficient. Howard PS Sorry for top-posting. Most rude :-) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Harte Sent: 25 August 2008 14:13 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Thinking aloud on polygon filling I've not actually done any coding on my Sam 3d experiments in a while, but I have been thinking a lot about the best way to implement polygon filling. I had a polygon filler working in a much earlier version of my code (see, e.g. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kr_Lz98qVjE from about 0:39) but it only did triangles, didn't clip and generally wasn't really up to snuff in several ways that hit the frame rate. Anyway, I've been playing around with a few ideas and was wondering if someone with a more instinctive grasp for this sort of thing might help out. I previously tried using a span buffer. Each pixel span (i.e. a horizontal line of pixels) was inserted into a linear list of existing spans for that scan line, by clipping it against the spans that were already there then shuffling things around in memory. So there was a binary search and then often a small LDIR. The entire frame was drawn at the end. I even tried a system whereby each span list was compared with the previous span list and only the differences were plotted. That was much faster than just dumbly drawing the whole list, but slower than just plotting the spans to the screen and not doing the list search and insert. Furthermore, as you add more polygons to the scene, the insert gets more expensive very quickly. Idea 1 is to divide the screen into 8×8 blocks, keep an overview that tags each as either block filled with a certain colour or messy. The polygon filler tags as many blocks as possible as completely filled, and consults modifies a 1 bit mask for each run of 8 pixels in a messy block. So searching the existing structures for each individual container is faster because it's O(1), and you're doing exactly as much searching as you were for a 64×64 rectangle, then maybe less or maybe more depending on the relative dimensions. As there are only 256 possible masks for each 8 pixel messy area, you can easily write 256 separate functions for that part of the insert (or have a program generate them). But you need to do some extra work to figure out how the polygon maps to each 8×8 block, whereas you need to know where it starts and ends in each scan line regardless. You're potentially keeping a 1 bit version of the entire display as well as the real screen, but that neatly fits onto the end of each screen's 32 kb page, conveniently ending exactly before the start position of my multiplication tables. Of course, messy areas are directly plotted to the display as they are drawn, solid colour blocks are drawn in a separate pass at the end, and not redrawn if they were the same colour in the preceding frame. Idea 2 is a closer modification of what I had. During the normal draw phase, spans are stored to a buffer, but this time in no particular order. At the end of frame, the spans are sorted and mutually clipped through the creation of a binary tree. Possibly the tree is serialised and compared to the previous span list at the end, to reduce overall drawing. So searching costs the same as it did, but inserts are cheaper
RE: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? OT Jam Assembler
Anyone else getting an error when compiling?:
Error: C:\JAM\O3D\OPENsource.s: Memory overflow! At Line 42
This points to an include into the last page of my project. Any ideas
David?
Howard
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of David Brant
Sent: 30 May 2008 17:56
To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no
Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam?
You can also import comet source directly into Jam Assembler from a SAM disk
image or file.
Dave
Jam Assembler download http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/stoneddesign
- Original Message -
From: Andrew Collier [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 10:39 AM
Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam?
On 30 May 2008, at 00:33, Thomas Harte wrote:
Did you produce any demos with Open3d that I could just load up and
view, without having to assemble? I didn't own COMET back in the day,
don't have a way to transfer disks to disk images anyway, and World of
Sam lists it as not yet approved for distribution.
Hi,
It looks like Comet is available from Edwin's own website here:
http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/edwin/software/comet/comet.htm
Edwin - i would it be okay by you, if I enable the download on WOS as
well?
Cheers,
Andrew
--
--- Andrew Collier
http://www.intensity.org.uk/ ---
--
RE: Attempts at 3d on the Sam?
Looks really good if you ask me. In answer to your question a few days ago: Did you produce any demos with Open3d that I could just load up and view, without having to assemble? I think you're mistaking me for a proper coder!!! I never produced anything worthwhile from it - decided I'd obviously bitten off more than I could chew. In OPENtest.S there are a few little demos though - some rotation, and a speed test. Wanted to see if I could ever get an acceptable framerate, and it ran one object at about 25fps. I'll have a crack at translating them. The interesting thing about your Elite rotation vid is that it seems a lot less accurate than I'd expect, does the brackets in your perspective equation x' = 128 + 128*(x/z) mean you're doing the x/z first? It seems smoother in the clipping vid although that might be just because the planes in the cube object are more orthogonal...? Alternatively it might be the process of doing 3 axes of rotation each frame. The view frustum clipping is very impressive, as I was going for speed I didn't even consider printing a polygon that didn't fall in front of the camera, although I knew that would eventually cause problems if I tried to render any suitably massive object that could be partially visible but also fall partially behind the camera. I didn't own COMET back in the day, don't have a way to transfer disks to disk images anyway, and World of Sam lists it as not yet approved for distribution. David's cross assembler looks amazing, I'll definitely have to check out moving some large projects over. It would be nice to finish some of these projects lying around(!) Howard -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Harte Sent: 01 June 2008 19:54 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? I have nothing particularly interesting or new to say, but I've just uploaded a couple more videos of my engine if anyone is interested. One shows the current code running on a real Sam both with and without a Mayhem accelerator (thanks to Colin Piggot for that one) and the other shows the code running in Sim Coupe, but demonstrates the fact that clipping works now and shows an object starting quite far away and then moving towards the camera, so as to distinguish my code from a limited-case demo effect. Real Sam, with and without Mayhem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PDfVjsiBzY Demo to show range, precision and clipping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2P64_IiCZA On 29 May 2008, at 22:27, Tobermory wrote: What version of O3D are you looking at? It looks like I mainly sorted it out in v 0.82. I went through pretty much the same process as you, considering a lookup table to be too time-costly if it was too large. It looks like I made a few odd choices as a result of trying to squash a perspective-correcting lookup table into a small space though, to its detriment: There are 128 X values ( -63 to 64) per Z=value, meaning even as close as possible to the camera (Z=0) the perspective correction would only be accurate to 2-pixel boundaries. I kept this accuracy for the Z-axis as well, so Z runs up to 1024 in steps of 2. 128 entries per X or Y value * 512 Z values = 65536 byte table. Makes sense so far, however this economy meant I couldn't use absolute values in the table, just offsets. So each entry is INT(RealX - CorrectedX). Not sure it's a great system because the size of the lookup table is unwieldy. The small range of values expected by the table meant a lot of messing around. If I was to repeat it I would probably look at using nice values in the equation NewX = OldX * S / (S + Z) You could easily make a table for the S/(S+Z) part - S is the perspective factor, and so would be unlikely to change frame-by-frame. (Although as the table might reasonably be 8-16K, this could be done at runtime, maybe go all 'fisheye lens' on one level...). The largest value here would be 1 and only if Z=0 is valid, if the view frustum puts the camera at Z=0 then it's not a problem. I'd keep this in 8.8 format, maybe even junk the whole number part. A quick on-paper tally says this might take up 150T-States. Next step is to work out a fast way of multiplying for the rest of the equation and the job's done. As you will be multiplying by n/256 this is a reasonable amount of My personal choice here would be to runs for a nice table again, but this time for a table of runnable code, not just values. Again, that's about another 100-150T-States. That would be an improvement on 2000 cycles you said at the beginning? Howard -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-sam- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Harte Sent: 27 May 2008 14:16 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? Just out of interest, having now checked it out - you
RE: Attempts at 3d on the Sam?
What version of O3D are you looking at? It looks like I mainly sorted it out in v 0.82. I went through pretty much the same process as you, considering a lookup table to be too time-costly if it was too large. It looks like I made a few odd choices as a result of trying to squash a perspective-correcting lookup table into a small space though, to its detriment: There are 128 X values ( -63 to 64) per Z=value, meaning even as close as possible to the camera (Z=0) the perspective correction would only be accurate to 2-pixel boundaries. I kept this accuracy for the Z-axis as well, so Z runs up to 1024 in steps of 2. 128 entries per X or Y value * 512 Z values = 65536 byte table. Makes sense so far, however this economy meant I couldn't use absolute values in the table, just offsets. So each entry is INT(RealX - CorrectedX). Not sure it's a great system because the size of the lookup table is unwieldy. The small range of values expected by the table meant a lot of messing around. If I was to repeat it I would probably look at using nice values in the equation NewX = OldX * S / (S + Z) You could easily make a table for the S/(S+Z) part - S is the perspective factor, and so would be unlikely to change frame-by-frame. (Although as the table might reasonably be 8-16K, this could be done at runtime, maybe go all 'fisheye lens' on one level...). The largest value here would be 1 and only if Z=0 is valid, if the view frustum puts the camera at Z=0 then it's not a problem. I'd keep this in 8.8 format, maybe even junk the whole number part. A quick on-paper tally says this might take up 150T-States. Next step is to work out a fast way of multiplying for the rest of the equation and the job's done. As you will be multiplying by n/256 this is a reasonable amount of My personal choice here would be to runs for a nice table again, but this time for a table of runnable code, not just values. Again, that's about another 100-150T-States. That would be an improvement on 2000 cycles you said at the beginning? Howard -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Harte Sent: 27 May 2008 14:16 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? Just out of interest, having now checked it out - you mention on your Open3d disk that you were planning to implement 'perspective tables'. Can I enquire as to what form they were intended to take? I briefly contemplated a lookup table, indexed by 15 bit depth (my values are signed, but obviously points with negative z are never projected since they never appear) to produce a 2 byte fixed point reciprocal value, but it seemed I'd probably need to spend 15 bits on the fractional part to get decent precision, putting me in the realm of then having to do at least a 16x16 - 32 multiply and pushing me towards the point where throwing 128 kb of RAM at the problem doesn't buy a justifiably large speed increase. On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 6:53 PM, Tobermory [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Still fascinated by the subject. After many many wasted hours fiddling around with routines, I can see that realtime updated 3D on the SAM is possible, but haven't got the brainpower to finish off my buggy work... Howard (=Tobermory) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Colin Piggot Sent: 08 April 2008 14:59 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? Thomas Harte wrote: I've just discovered pyz80 and am having a fresh bash at some Sam projects. As I'm simultaneously working on a Freescape interpreter for the PC, my thoughts have inevitably turned to 3d on the Sam, even if it means a Freescape-style non-realtime display. Cool! besides Stratosphere, the F16 demo and that brief gameover bit in Dyzonium, are there any other playable segments of games that demonstrate 3d graphics? I know there are some demos with bits of 3d graphics, but I figure that spending 256 kb on getting the fastest possible rotating cube isn't a helpful guide. The game over segment of Dyzonium was all precalculated as far as I can remember, not processed in realtime. has it been established whether the animated gifs of Chrome featured on http://www.samcoupe.com/preview.htm represents the speed at which the game would play on a real, unexpanded Sam? No, I had just made the animated gifs from screens drawn up by some of my early test routines. is there any speed advantage to using the ROM routines such as JDRAW, JPUT and/or JBLITZ? I appreciate that they are more general case than routines that it makes sense to write for a game, but as I understand it the ROM is uncontended? The ROM is uncontended, but you would still be faster to write your own optimised routines, tailored specifically to exactly what you want to do. With Stratosphere I came up with a whole set of faster line drawing and clearing routines, which for example took advantage
RE: Interlaced video
I guess it's going to be pretty random. Hmm interesting. If its interlace mode for normal broadcast telly works, (ie you always get ABABAB not BABABA) then it must be receiving some other signal to identify the A frames from the Bs. Does turning off the screen with an OUT 252,0 reset it? Howard -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dave Laundon Sent: 22 May 2008 20:56 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Interlaced video 2008/5/22 Colin Piggot [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Now the question is, depending how the TV is interlacing the frames, and how many frames there's been since the SAM was powered up - when the 'Interlaced Pictures' from FRED are loaded the frames might show with the intended 'interlacing', or be reversed - if 'A' is the frame with the top row, 'B' is the frame with the row to be shown below, your telly could interlace correctly so the TV displays with the lines ordered ABABAB, or could be out of order and display BABABA (hope that makes sense!) Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. I guess it's going to be pretty random. I'll type that ROLL test in again and keep running it and see if the orientation changes. Kind of makes any applications difficult without a calibration option! I seem to remember there was a cover tape on one of the magazines that had a new display mode that swapped between two screens at 50Hz or something. Can't remember if it was interlacing or some method of increasing colours. My memory is vague... Makes me want to dig out those Fred issues with interlaced images on them to see how they look. If only my drive worked... (Colin, do you still have spare belts? :-) Should do, I'll drop you an email in a bit once i've checked :) Thanks. Must get him up and running again :-) Dave. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 269.24.1/1463 - Release Date: 23/05/2008 15:36 No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 269.24.1/1463 - Release Date: 23/05/2008 15:36
RE: Attempts at 3d on the Sam?
...er. Unrealistic at a 21st Century framerate is probably the correct elaboration. Freescape was fun, sure. I expect someone could do a pretty fabulous conversion of Sentinel or something. By the way - never did get any screenshots of O3D, although it would do some nice stuff at the time - it let me run around some blocks and stuff. I'll see whether anything's still working with it. Howard -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Harte Sent: 09 April 2008 23:45 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? I don't see how a Freescape-style engine for the Sam is technically unrealistic. Please elaborate. On 9 Apr 2008, at 22:19, Aleš Keprt wrote: Guys, please be realistic. 3D on Sam sucks. /--- Aley -- - Original Message - From: Thomas Harte [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 3:35 PM Subject: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? Hi, I've just discovered pyz80 and am having a fresh bash at some Sam projects. As I'm simultaneously working on a Freescape interpreter for the PC, my thoughts have inevitably turned to 3d on the Sam, even if it means a Freescape-style non-realtime display. I'm therefore curious about lots of things, and have a multitude of questions: - besides Stratosphere, the F16 demo and that brief gameover bit in Dyzonium, are there any other playable segments of games that demonstrate 3d graphics? I know there are some demos with bits of 3d graphics, but I figure that spending 256 kb on getting the fastest possible rotating cube isn't a helpful guide. - has it been established whether the animated gifs of Chrome featured on http://www.samcoupe.com/preview.htm represents the speed at which the game would play on a real, unexpanded Sam? - is there any speed advantage to using the ROM routines such as JDRAW, JPUT and/or JBLITZ? I appreciate that they are more general case than routines that it makes sense to write for a game, but as I understand it the ROM is uncontended? To be honest, I can imagine that something like Chrome could be done with a live update since most of the display doesn't change between most frames (it's just a bunch of vertical strips of colour that quite often change height and occasionally change colour), and the algorithms that are commonly used to calculate scenes such as that in Chrome make it really cheap to calculate out a minimal list of the required changes. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.22.11/1368 - Release Date: 09/04/2008 16:20 No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.22.13/1375 - Release Date: 12/04/2008 11:32
RE: Attempts at 3d on the Sam?
Still fascinated by the subject. After many many wasted hours fiddling around with routines, I can see that realtime updated 3D on the SAM is possible, but haven't got the brainpower to finish off my buggy work... Howard (=Tobermory) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Colin Piggot Sent: 08 April 2008 14:59 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Attempts at 3d on the Sam? Thomas Harte wrote: I've just discovered pyz80 and am having a fresh bash at some Sam projects. As I'm simultaneously working on a Freescape interpreter for the PC, my thoughts have inevitably turned to 3d on the Sam, even if it means a Freescape-style non-realtime display. Cool! besides Stratosphere, the F16 demo and that brief gameover bit in Dyzonium, are there any other playable segments of games that demonstrate 3d graphics? I know there are some demos with bits of 3d graphics, but I figure that spending 256 kb on getting the fastest possible rotating cube isn't a helpful guide. The game over segment of Dyzonium was all precalculated as far as I can remember, not processed in realtime. has it been established whether the animated gifs of Chrome featured on http://www.samcoupe.com/preview.htm represents the speed at which the game would play on a real, unexpanded Sam? No, I had just made the animated gifs from screens drawn up by some of my early test routines. is there any speed advantage to using the ROM routines such as JDRAW, JPUT and/or JBLITZ? I appreciate that they are more general case than routines that it makes sense to write for a game, but as I understand it the ROM is uncontended? The ROM is uncontended, but you would still be faster to write your own optimised routines, tailored specifically to exactly what you want to do. With Stratosphere I came up with a whole set of faster line drawing and clearing routines, which for example took advantage of the undocumented instructions to split IX and IY into four 8 bit registers, and for clearing it just cleared a byte, and didn't worry about nibble pixels. To be honest, I can imagine that something like Chrome could be done with a live update since most of the display doesn't change between most frames (it's just a bunch of vertical strips of colour that quite often change height and occasionally change colour), and the algorithms that are commonly used to calculate scenes such as that in Chrome make it really cheap to calculate out a minimal list of the required changes. I had come up with quite a lot of tricks that would have made Chrome as fast as it could. Solid walls 2 pixels wide, so you are dealing with just byte values and not nibbles, and means walls could be quickly extended/shrunk when drawing the next frame. There's a 9 page article about the work I had done on Chrome in issue 16 of SAM Revival magazine with more info. Colin == Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the Sam Coupe 1995-2008 - Celebrating 14 Years of developing for the Sam Coupe Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.22.9/1364 - Release Date: 07/04/2008 18:38 No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.22.9/1364 - Release Date: 07/04/2008 18:38
RE: What games
Chris, Is this also true for music? Would it have any direct benefit? Howard (still reading the list in the background) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Chris White Sent: 20 May 2007 11:14 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: RE: What games ;) anything is possible .. just have to change the way u think about coding and stay away from systems .. ie sprite systems / scrolling systems make ever function bespoked to that task .. ie make a sprite cutter that loads data directly instead of reading from a ram location n writing to screen ie .. HL = screen addre (HL) , 0xff inc l (HL) , 0x7f inc l etc is far quicker than ld a,(de) ld (hl),a inc e (if u can get away with having 256 byte sprite data (8x8 are this u see hence there popular)) inc l (till next line that is ;)) Just means u have to write sprite cutters to output the source code .. then each sprite draw will be a jump table call C _ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Calvin Allett Sent: 20 May 2007 10:46 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: What games Just a quick thought, What games could be accomplished on the ol` SAM, everybody always says about how underpowered the SAM is in Mode 4, but when I`m playing more Spectrum games recently, I`m getting a certain shock as to how many games ran at perhaps lower than 8 fps, and yet it doesn`t matter, perhaps I should have asked what games could be done. Could Avenger be done at a similar framerate, for example? _ Yahoo! Answers - Got a question? Someone out there knows the answer. HYPERLINK http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/;_ylc=X3oDMTEzaDRkZGdlBF9TAzIxMTQ3MTcxOTAEc2VjA 01haWwEc2xrA3RhZ2xpbmVzTry it now. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.7.5/812 - Release Date: 19/05/2007 13:52 No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.7.5/812 - Release Date: 19/05/2007 13:52
Re: Preferred plain text editor
I remember these being painfully slow, both of them. I 'only' type at 45-50 wpm and they both missed loads of letter out. Wolfgang Haller said: Hideho Gavin. Don´t fall in tears! Have a look at Fred issue 8, there is a Notepad by Dan Brice. A better Notepad by Calvin Allett can be found on Fred 36. A so called painful rudymentary wordprocessor is on Fred 5, called Processor and comes from McDonald/McConell. So have a try. Wolfgang Gavin Smith schrieb: Simple question - I need a decent plain text editor on the SAM. Lean and neat, but nice to use (i.e. not vi ;) Is there one out there? Will it keep up with my typing? (120wpm...) Gavin --- http://www.cookingcircle.co.uk - Staying in http://www.evilheartedme.co.uk - Going out ---
Re: ASCD for Windows
Aley Keprt said: ASCD for Windows..should it still be called ASCD? I've been waiting for years for someone to use Text-Mex. A very 80's joke! :) -howard --- http://www.cookingcircle.co.uk - Staying in http://www.evilheartedme.co.uk - Going out ---
Re: Announcement - Sam Revival 4 out now!
Hello Colin Has my subscription run out yet? I'm not sure where I am with it. Thanks, Howard (Price) Colin Piggot said: Issue four of Sam Revival is out now! (February / March 2003)
D'oh
Whoops didn't mean to send private mail to the list. Sorry!
OT - RE: Waterworks
Simon Owen said: Lucky sod - If I ever tried to do the same, my wife would have a DIY timetable drawn up for me before I could even load Comet! You need a bit on the side! Everyone would think you were sneaking off to her house for slap/tickle/yorkshire pud, but really you'd just have a SAM in a can set up in the attic.-Tob --- http://www.cookingcircle.co.uk - Staying in http://www.evilheartedme.co.uk - Going out ---
RE: Waterworks
Don't keep us waiting, spill beans! spill beans! Graham Goring said: He did indeed tell me, so nerr! ;) Graham -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 10 February 2003 14:27 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Waterworks Well, it turns out that I managed to track down Martin Bell and he is the chap who worked at EA/Bullfrog/BigBlueBox so at last I shall know how he did the water in Waterworks! Hurrah! Graham That is, assuming he'll tell you ! :-) --- http://www.cookingcircle.co.uk - Staying in http://www.evilheartedme.co.uk - Going out ---
What's SAM's job?
It struck me with all the replies to Moment of Truth, that there are lots of people who still actively use their SAMs every week. There's certainly still people who are trying to get hold of them, and they don't sound like collectors only. The question is: what do you use your SAM for these days? Is it retro games-playing? Nostalgia? Something else? And is there any software you wish the SAM had that's not been done?? -Tobermory
Re: What's SAM's job?
Colin and Adrian wrote: There are a few bits of software that im looking for, but im aiming to write some of them so keep your eyes out. One is currently being done step by step in Sam Revival. And very nice articles they are too, and I know what it's all leading too :D It kind of reminds me of 'Your Sinclair' and all the type in programs! I've got to agree. I've always avoided accessing (hard)disks by machine code so I'm interested to see where you go next!
RE: a thought (was RE: Moment of truth)
There are several free ide's available, there was one developed for the GBC which was a near z80 chip. Trouble is I still like using comet :D A. Personally, I'm fed up with COMET now. I'm getting too lazy and want it to fix my problems for me. How about an extension to it that automatically colourcodes known opcodes, EQUates and spelling mistakes? Just like they do with my C compiler.-Tob
RE: Moment of truth
1) Do you have an actual Sam Coupe: Yep 2) Does it work? Yep! 3) Do you still use it? Yep - every day mate 4) How many bits of sam software have you got? About 30 5) Do you still actively seek new sam bits and pieces? Yes, though I can't afford em. 6) Would you buy a new game for the sam coupe if the price was right? Yes, as many as come out. Marketing tip: I could buy 6 games at £5 but not one game at £25. It's because I buy on a whim, and £25 is big enough to save. Sorry Quasar. 7) What price would be right if you would? Less than £10. I think there should be more free code and totally free games. It's more fun than you think. 8) Would you develop a title for the sam still? Yes, though I'd rather go for lots of little stuff - people's 'projects' are too big for them to cope with. 9) Would you help develop a title for the sam? Just say the word - www.cookingcircle.co.uk, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10) Do you think that all the work put in to keep the sam alive is a waste of time? It's a hobby! Get stuff done but don't get divorced because of it. My dad's a morris dancer. /NONSEQUITUR People should stop seeing the SAM as a failed way to make a living, it's a lifestyle choice. You code on 8-bit machines because it's fun, and you'll meet some other geeks. :)
Re: Moment of truth
On Wednesday 15 Jan 2003 2:03 pm, Andrew Collier wrote: my parent's loft Ahem. Sorry - parents' Before Ian says anything. Andrew Ouch! You'll never get into the Booker Prize shortlist! -H
Re: Moment of truth -- Database?
This sort of information is great for people who still want to do stuff community-wise on the SAM. Would SAM Community like to add it to its original database (I recall the questions were quite similar??) and publish on its website?
RE: Re: OT: Z-buffering was Re: So long 2002, here comes 2003....
Thomas Harte wrote: If you store a table of square roots for the Pythagoras, it speeds up nicely (big table, but hell, you'll already be storing perspective correction tables and SINE tables, so you won't be bothered about memory). There is an entire web page somewhere dedicated to getting fast sqrts. I've seen one which uses only a 256 or 512 byte table but can do a 16bit sqrt in less than 100 cycles. Have you got the URL for this??? I'm quite interested in how it's done. -Howard
SDCC - Freeware ANSI C
Interest anyone, this? Haven't had much of a chance to look at it yet. -Tob ...a Freeware , retargettable, optimizing ANSI - C compiler. The current version targets the Intel 8051 and the Zilog Z80 based MCUs. http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/
Re: Scrolling (was RE: So long 2002, here comes 2003....)
From Geoff: Well things like Defender (I haven't seen the Sam version, but my memory of the game is of large blocks of single colour) cheat by only moving the edges. A bit like the old Snake game you get now on Nokia phones - since the mid-sections aren't moving you only need to draw the beginning and the end. My Big Scrolly Demo (on NVG, I believe) used this technique to draw a full-screen-height scrolltext. Damn! This beats my 80 pixel high 50pfs scroller by 192-80 pixels! You can save some time per frame by turning off the screen and reducing screen contention, which looks... interesting. If you try turning the screen off for frames where the scroller/game has not updated, you get a dead smooth effect, unfortunately the brightness goes right down. Maybe it would be good for a ghost adventure? Middle of the night? Partial Blindness Survival-em-up??? -Tob
Re: So long 2002, here comes 2003....
From Stuart Brady: Then a new version of Elite for the Sam would be really good, as I'm sure that the framerate, resolution, colour, and/or sound/music and maybe even a few other things could be improved. I've heard that the BBC version works using a z-buffer, in thin strips (due to memory contraints). The SAM can of course use much larger strips, but I'd like to know if there's any alternative to a z-buffer. I've noticed that most of the time there are only one or two ships visable on the screen at a time, so I'd have thought that hidden surface removal would often suffice. Any thoughts? Z buffering doesn't *seem* to provide enough saving for small amounts of objects to be useful. Obviously there are cases when one object obscures large amounts of another, but with a few objects this case is quite rare, relatively speaking. In the times when there ISN'T this case, z buffering takes up quite a bit of time. However it looks like hardware support for Z buffering will take off, cos these days there are always millions of polys on screen at once. Then the chances of obfuscation are pretty good, so the gamble pays off. (Just imagine I'm an old man who can't stand clever graphics. I like those games where you press a key to fire your weapons, and a message comes up - you have missed the target. **Press a key to fire your weapons**) -Tob
RE: Scrolling (was RE: So long 2002, here comes 2003....)
From Geoff: I can imagine that would look horrible on a decent monitor, though :( SAM resolution? Decent monitor! Never the twain!
Re: OT: Z-buffering was Re: So long 2002, here comes 2003....
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailer: SquirrelMail (version 1.2.6) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From Colin: However it looks like hardware support for Z buffering will take off, cos these days there are always millions of polys on screen at once. Then the chances of obfuscation are pretty good, so the gamble pays off. Just like PowerVR's gfx chips with tile rendering, which process the z-buffering for the screen in small blocks and render only what is visible. Where was I? Suggestions - a good old depth sort from overall distance from the camera works quite well for space 3D. If you store a table of square roots for the Pythagoras, it speeds up nicely (big table, but hell, you'll already be storing perspective correction tables and SINE tables, so you won't be bothered about memory). You could also try doing a view frustum cull beforehand to reduce the list to just visible objects, or take the easy route and just make sure the objects are forward of the camera. You count the T-States and take your choice! Right now I'm tinkering with adding 'building block' sector coords to each object, like a vague grid reference. Then you could easily apply a 'bitmapped' view frustum to search the main area for potentially visible objects. I'm not convinced yet, but it may work -Tob
Re: So long 2002, here comes 2003....
On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 11:37:59PM -, f-k-nose wrote: - Original Message - From: Stuart Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 11:32 PM Subject: Re: So long 2002, here comes 2003 Store two 256-byte buffers for each line. 128 bytes from an offset (initially starting at 0) into the first buffer for each line would be copied onto the screen, followed by a pause, and then the same for the second buffer which scrolls everything by one pixel. At that point, new bytes are written into the buffers at this offset, and at offset+128. The offset is then incremented, and if it reaches 128, it is reset to 0. Try the Rainbow Scroller on www.cookingcircle.co.uk - this was the last scroller experiment I used. Because it wobbled up and down it was more sensible to keep track of the height for each bit, the source address for each part of the letters etc etc. The quickest way of accessing the dynamic tables for all this info was by using the undocumented opcodes, because you start to run out of registers otherwise - you can do INC HX (msb of IX) etc By the way, I didn't bother with pixel accuracy either, though I did consider it. For about 10 minutes :) -Howard
Re: So long 2002, here comes 2003....
Agreed. 2002 was a great year for Quazar (and therefore for the SAM in general), can't wait for what you're going to do next Sending emails 2 minutes into the new year? No need! -Tob
EBay SAM with two floppies
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemitem=2071262963 Anybody want to own up to being Manic Monkey? -Tobermory secret mailing at work
re: Game Engine Development
To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Howard Price [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Game engine development... At 03:45 31/08/02, Simon Cooke wrote: I know this is a vague request, but currently we're looking at doing any one of three different things - a 1st person puzzlesolver/shooter, a real-time strategy game, or an updated port of Tempest ;-) So... Chris? Colin McD? Anybody? Thanks, Si I'm an anybody! I've been tinkering with game development and putting the results up on the web for a fair few months now. Today the cooking circle reaches its 30th update - www.cookingcircle.co.uk. The Tempest thing looks the most interesting, but when you say realtime strategy, do you mean online gaming?? -howard
