Atari-Forum

Still blitzed at work, I'm afraid. It's been non-stop for the last 6 months or so, and I can't see it letting up in the near future. I'm knee-deep in $20k FPGA boards at the moment... [sigh].

I ought to call this project phoenix, because it *will* rise from the ashes, but not just yet.

Simon

I have the parts I need now, but it's had to take a back seat due to work commitments

I can't see any progress being made for another 6 months or so, unfortunately ...

Simon

Well, I haven't posted for quite a while, mainly because of work requirements going ballistic. Things are starting to scale down now, so I can start thinking about other-than-work issues again... In the meantime, I did actually manage to get some trials up and running between 2 MCU's, simulating the...

So, here's a couple of closer-in pictures: First, with a macro-lens on the iPhone. This is actually showing the real quality of the representation of full-on RGB (white) and nothing (black) pixels... http://0x0000ff.com/imgs/tt/ecl-pixels.jpg ... and then a more zoomed-out version of the same screen...

So, more of a progress bump than anything else - I'm (slowly) getting my head around how the ARM chip works, and I now have a small kernel up and running on the dev-board, flashing lights and responding to serial over USB, in other words, "Hello, World!" is up and running :) http://0x0000ff.com/imgs...

So the NEC monitor turned up, and I spent some time tuning the parameters - initially it looked awful, but after some hints from tenox, and some further playing around I've got a rock-solid stable display, with each pixel visible and no blurring or aliasing. It's phenomenal; there's no better way of...

Just to confirm that the LCD is indeed the cheapest and nastiest possible model from Frys... I think I paid ~$30 for it in an end-of-line sale they were having. I originally bought it for some FPGA interfacing which used standard resolutions and image quality wasn't important - it was just there for...

Anodyne - I may well take you up on that as I get closer to the replace-the-VDI stage. Once it's functional (ie: all the VDI opcodes do what they're supposed to), and then once the hardware is working (I need to learn more about the STM32F4 chip before that can work), I'll want the software on the T...

Minor milestone along the way... I patched aranym to allow the hostfs service to talk to sockets as well as files, which let me cross-compile the test-client code and run it within aranym as an atari executable... http://0x0000ff.com/imgs/tt/aranym-test.png I then had to handle byte-swapping of word...

Yeah, I saw the OpenGL one, but at the moment I've managed to not have to use OpenGL to get anything done. If I can stay in 2D-land (and keep things less complex) I'd prefer to do that for the time being. Perhaps one day the VDI will be able to render to a surface and warp/distort itself when you sw...

You're right, apparently. They seem to have crippled Qt since I last used it. The following aproach might be an option: since you are not targeting multiple platforms, you could probably get away using the underlying OpenGL calls which can be accessed using QPainter.beginNativePainting() followed b...

I guess I'm not understanding much of what you're saying there. How about a concrete example ? :) Basically I need to be able to draw all the ops in all the drawing-modes. It looks like you're saying to use single functions that cope with combined options ? (eg: draw an rfbox in xor mode is one func...

Thanks mfro, that's darn useful. I'll have another look at it when I get home

Simon

Progress (or lack of, really) update... I'm still a bit stuck on the vswr_mode() call - I think I can figure out how to do MODE_REPLACE, MODE_TRANSPARENT and MODE_REVERSE_TRANSPARENT, but I can't for the life of me manage to persuade MODE_XOR to strut its funky stuff... Take the code for v_rfbox (or...

Sorry for this little intromission...and maybe silly question, but is there possible to make on a VME bus, a card with 2 or more funcionalities? I mean, a GFX and an IDE controller, or a GFX+IDE+Ethernet? For the Mega STe there is Alanh's IDE controller but for the TT...just SCSI, and SCSI-IDE solu...

If anyone wants to look over http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtgui/qpainter.html#compositionMode and correct me, I'm all ears :) Not sure if I looked deep enough, but wouldn't it be possible to handle that by setBackgroundMode() (Qt::TransparentMode or Qt::OpaqueMode)? Maybe. At the moment I'm try...

So, I've got as far as vswr_mode()... This one is a bit of a problem - I can't see any of QT's composition modes being the same as mode 2 (Transparent - only non-zero colours in the source replace the destination pixels). The best I can do I think is a multi-step process, where I render into a black...

So, I got the pcduino running at 1920 x 1080 @ 60fps yesterday, although the process is a bit involved. You have to download and compile the sunxi tools, mount the nand flash, run one of the tools to convert a binary file to text, edit the text, then run another tool to convert the text back to a bi...

So just another note - I'm now past where I was in the X11 lib code - just finished v_justified() in all three modes (pad-words, pad-chars, and pad-both). QT actually has the ability to do this built into its font system, which came as a nice surprise. I wrote the justify algorithm as a pre-filter o...

Well, you can have my vote for a graphics card, but I thought that was a bit redundant, because I'm building one ( http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=25339 ) :) Simon Hi Simon, added as a project under development on first post. I do not know if it is in an advance development or testi...

So, it may have seemed all quiet on the VME front, but things are proceeding apace. I originally started to implement the Xwindows software in the low-level Xlib, but after struggling with different rotations of fonts (X really doesn't make that easy), I decided to bite the bullet and implement in Q...

Well, you can have my vote for a graphics card, but I thought that was a bit redundant, because I'm building one (http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=25339)

Simon

shoggoth wrote:Suggestion - have a look at the EmuTOS sources.

Thanks, good idea. It looks as though they actually draw the markers using polylines. Good to know

One more point of interest... I found a page on the web ( http://membled.com/work/mca/x11perf/ ) where someone has the x11perfcomp results for a 486DX/33 (roughly comparable to the TT) with an ET4000 graphics card (which is one of the more-common cards used for TT graphics add-ons). I've attached th...

Colours... One thing that is becoming clear is that the VDI has its feet firmly planted in the palette-based world, where there are a small-ish number of colours available at any one time, rather than the true-colour world where any colour can be plotted on the screen whenever you want. I'm not sure...