[TK.]

You mean: reusing the VIC from an old C64 -> next year ;-)

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[Steven_C]

Don't push the man! He's not a slave! TK, take some time out, and make some music or something!!! ;) (but I know you enjoy this! Living out the techy dreams of your 80's youth!) do you like the daft punk album,("discovery"), I think it is way 80's and cheesy, just like us!!

[TK.]

No I don't know the new album yet, but I will check it on the next trip through the CD store - thanks for the hint :)

Some words to the improved resolution: I haven't taken into account that storing so much characters per line also costs too much RAM. Another problem is the "tblrd" instruction which takes 2 cycles instead of one - very bad for "balanced code" (a requirement for proper graphics).

So a compromise would be an alternative mode with 40x25 ROM characters, and maybe another alternative mode which allows to split the screen in two halfs for a big and a small font. Let's check it next weekend ;-)

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[Nomical]

It seems the problem of RAM limitations seem to pop up more and more, isn't it?
Wouldn't it be possible to make additional 'external' RAM?

[TK.]

To prevent any rumours: For most applications this isn't true.

External RAM requires a completely different "core module" concept for an external bus interface. The realization is easy, but the circuit would be too complex for beginners (due to the increased number of connections) and much more expensive! It would limit the number of free PIC pins so that they would have to be replaced by multiplexers and latches, attached on the bus.

Since the effort for myself would be to high to support two different concepts, I will stay by the current solution and try to live with the limitations, hoping that Microchip releases new compatible derivatives with even more internal RAM in the next years.

However, external RAM won't help here, the access times are at least 10 cycles (possibly more, depends on the hardware design), this would result to a resolution of maybe 32x64 pixels ;-)

Expected resolution with internal memory (by using ROM fonts, I will try it this weekend): 300xYYY pixels (YYY only limited by the number of scanlines of your TV) -maybe more

For comparison the possible resolution if more internal RAM would be available: ca 580xYYY
But most TVs wouldn't be able to display it properly...

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[pay_c]

300 ??!!?? *giggling mode on*

yeahyeahyeah !!! coooool

Having displayed the 64 pots on one row!

*giggling mode off*

coooool... its getting better and better (and more bad for my purse)  ;D

[TK.]

displaying all pot values - a nice example, yes :)

I just have evaluated what I said - good results - here two quick hacks:

40x25


56x25


In reality it looks better, the resolution of my digicam reduces the quality, and it's especially a rectangle frame on my TV and not a trapezoid ;-)

56x25 characters are the absolute maximum (concerning speed, memory, realtime behaviour)

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[stryd_one]

Man I have WAY too many questions here heheheheh

What's the story with ROM fonts? How are they used? I'd love to do menus using the character set, like in those old DOS apps... But I would rather lots of blocks and lines and special characters, than both uppercase and lowercase alphanumeric characters... Having the whole alphabet there twice seems such a waste, those characters could be musical notes, or bar graphs or menu icons etc... Can the character sets be changed? (R.O.M. implies 'no', I guess)

Could say two (or 3 or four etc) MBHPTV modules be used on one tv screen by somehow offsetting the sizes and positions of the images and mixing them? This could be seriously cool, and a (kinda clunky) way to increase resolution... Say you could have 4 cores, each displaying on one corner of the screen...

Too many ideas! Too many questions!! I'm gonna explode!

[pilo]

for ROM font, I think we can change them? they are include in the asm file, and the "video" memory is fill with the ascII code of the character : 56*25 = 1400 byte of memory.

for the multiple core way.... mmm I think it may be hard to synchronized...

[TK.]

Exactly! :)

Every character set which consists of 256 characters allocates 2k, so you could store 8 different sets in flash and assign it to different scanline sections.

A synchronization between multiple cores isn't realistic for this application. Main reason: the "goto" instruction which is required to poll a flag or a signal takes two cycles. This results to a 1-cycle error which will be visible on screen (jittering scanlines).

It was a challenge to solve the jitter problem in the existing code - fortunately I found a solution which compensates the error (-> H_SYNC macro)
For external, asynchronous signals a deterministic compensation isn't possible.

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[Steven_C]

actually, I'm not sure if the daft punk album is really called discovery... I don't know what gave me that impression, I just looked, and it just says "daft punk" on the cover, and it is silver and multicoloured, and not silver and brown, like the old one. BTW it is on Virgin records, and I got the Vinyl LP edition ;D ! Sorry to get so off topic!!

 bye ;)

[gillesdeshays]

On an electroni french magazine, there is a schematic for :

Speaking PIC !!!!

you load some ".wav" (without header) into a 24c256.....

and the PIC (with a simple resistor network DAC) outs your audio file !!!!

so nice !

I imagine a speaking "On TV" mega Mios BOX !!!!!!!!

I can scan the whole schematics ......

[pilo]

yeah!!!!!! I can write tool for the wave stuff if you want :) and I want that in my future midibox C4 clone!
which magazine?

[gillesdeshays]

hey Pilo don't spend money .......

i'll put it online this nite !

[pay_c]

Just crazy people around here  ;D ;) ;D

;D :o :P 8) ;D

[gillesdeshays]

i think it just begin to be interresting ........... ???











;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[TK.]

dito.... ;-)

ordneren: just wait for the next release (after my holidays), it will make clear how to create customized/animated fonts. In the meantime you could already play with the script in the utils directory, but it requires a paint program which supports the .xpm format (support for the windows-specific .bmp format is planned for the future)

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[gillesdeshays]

so fun to play :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ))))))))))))))))))

[pay_c]

bmp ? Just dont believe it...

OK, lets get all this together:

We do have:

A TV connected, with whatever animated fonts on it, playing some .wav file ("MBHP ruuuuuuulz"), some flashing LEDs, some moving Motorfaders, flickering LCDs (naturally dozens of those), a few SIDs in that box ............ a yeah, and we control the whole studio over MIDI.

... ... ...  8)  gonna be a looooong soldering session.