Anyone for Tetris?

For some reason I made a version of Tetris for the V6Z80P  :)

More V6Z80Ps

I’ve had some more enquiries regarding the V6Z80P so I’ve just ordered some parts to make five more.  [Edit] These boards have now been sold.

Construction time again..

More improvements and utilities have been created for the V6Z80P..

• The OS now loads from a normal file on the root directory of the SD card, previously it required a special installer to place it on reserved sectors.
• New apps:  Playwav.exe – to play wav files and Showbmp.exe to (guess what!) display .bmp pictures.
• New command km.exe – to change keymaps.
• Following a suggestion from Branislav, Daniel has made Chfnt.exe – an app which changes the OS font. The front end can now resemble that of your favourite 8 bit micro :)
• The slideshow program has been improved to load native .bmp pics of various size, it also slides each picture over the previous one using the LineCop to split the screen and swap palettes.
• I’ve improved the filesystem code – previously it would perform a full seek from the start of a file each time a smaller section of  a file was loaded, but now that only happens in the filepointer is changed. Loading sequential segments of files is now a lot faster. (This was necessary for the playwav program as it loads/buffers whilst playing.)

V6Z80P Wiki

With the assistance of Martin and Valen, an online wiki version of the V6Z8oP documentation has been set up. How thoroughly modern!

http://wiki.uelectronics.info/wiki/

Some new demos..

I’ve been coding various routines to test new features of my OSCA architecture so thought I may as well tidy them up and make some more demos..

V6Z80P Update Roundup

Work on the Z80 Project continues, here’s a list of recent updates:

OSCA – FPGA architecture:

• Interlace timing mode, increases the vertical resolution 2x on PAL and NTSC TVs.  Would be easier to use if the bitplane pointers had line modulos, something I may look into later.
• Sound system interrupts. There are now flags which become set when each channel loops (re-reads its location and length pointers). These flags are OR’d into a new interrupt source. This allows long samples to be played seamlessly as the buffer data and pointers can be set up ahead and switched when the previous buffer has been played.
• Double buffered palette – saves the need to write to the palette registers off screen to avoid glitches.
• New Sprite modes – X mirror image, Matte mode (forces all non-zero pixels to a single colour) and high palette  (sets bit 7 of pixels indexes, providing a simple means of switching video priority per sprite)

FLOS – Operating system

• OS can now be assembled to use FAT16 instead of my own filesystem, alas no room for both.
• Rewrite of the text plotting code, now uses to the blitter - allows colour in the fonts (15 foreground and background colours)
• Added new Kernal (sic!)  commands for directory listing, character plotting,  low level sector access..

Meanwhile, other V6Z80p owners have been making some nice programs.. Valen has provided a C framework for using SDCC with the V6Z80p and Daniel has made a PT3 tracker player.

Eyup, it’s all gone “Wordpress”

I’ve given into peer pressure and converted Retroleum to Wordpress.  Most of the old site has been changed to suit, but some of the older articles remain to be done (beware of broken links too).  The more “bloggy” format and ease of updating offered by Wordpress may mean this front page gets updated more often..  and then again it may not :) Updates are more visible anyway..

Still one V6Z80P for sale BTW…

V5Z80P – Redux

With the V6Z80P taken as far as I can for the time being, my attention has returned to the last V5Z80P sitting in my cupboard. I’ve brought it up to date with the addition of a few soldered links on the PCB and an update of the FPGA config. Its now almost the same as the V6 (multiple configs, latest OSCA hardware, Spectrum emulator, OS etc) though obviously still has an IDE connector instead of SD card, less memory and off-board PSU. If you’re interested, have a look at this page - the board is up for grabs at the below cost price of £50 plus postage+paypal fee. Existing owners of the V5Z80P can update their boards to 5.1 spec by following the info in the new V5Z80P folder.

LineCop

Line Sync'd Copro Test

Been improving OSCA on the V6Z80P some more. I’ve now added a line sync’d co-processor, which like the Amiga’s Copper, runs its own program under DMA to write to the video registers at specific scan lines without using the CPU or interrupts. Also added a slightly ‘experimental’ display option to the bitmap mode, which I’ve call Flood. When this is selected, colours can be ’smeared’ across a scanline depending on the value of the current pixel – this may be useful for automatically filled vector graphics, though it would need some careful line-drawing. Finally, I’ve improved the tilemap mode – you can now have a single bank of 2032 tiles, as the system uses 2-byte tile indexes (some of the upper bits are used to flip the tile images vertically and horizontally as well).

V6Z80P Done!

The V6Z80P is complete. This new version has some slight enhancements over the previous V5Z80P, most notably 512KB video RAM and 512KB system RAM. The other big change is the removal of the IDE interface (which has been replaced with an MMC/SD card slot) and the inclusion of the power supply socket+regulators onboard. One last improvement is better configuration management – the onboard EEPROM can hold upto 4 different FPGA configs (and the OS) and its now possible to reprogram it in situ. Apart from that.. its the same size (116×120mm) and is backwards compatible with the existing V5Z80P. The full project archive (12MB) as it currently exists can be downloaded from mediafire.