Quote:
Originally Posted by Toni Wilen
I guess i missed that when I tested it on my real A500.. (I also missed those vertical lines in 1st anniversary until I accidentally noticed it few days ago..)
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Ahhh, if you missed the black lines then you also missed the "resolution". I mean, black lines are because of BPL5DAT, but BPL5DAT is also responsible for getting into the higher 16 colors so if there weren't the black lines then the elements resolution is one 8x3 pix element instead of two 3x3 pix elements.
One more thing: both bpl5dat and bpl6dat are used when in "7bpl" mode, if I am not wrong. So the machine is actually in half-brite mode. Don't miss to use bpl6dat too! In the anniversary intro I filled bpl6dat with zeros, but I might make some new demo using half-brite in the future...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Toni Wilen
Not suprising, I had to add multiple ugly hacks to support this "chip mirroring"  |
Sorry, not my fault... Commodore did it - I only used it...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Toni Wilen
btw, do you have more weird demos? |
Actually yes. Well, it's not a demo but rather a small trick. But it's not likely that many people used it and I doubt it is worth emulating.
I made a small program which plays some one channel music using floppy drive motor. Don't tell me, I know what you are thinking ->
I mean, didn't we all tried to connect small motors instead of earphones to our cassette players when we were kids?!?
I didn't have the processor timing table at the moment so I wrote a simple loop to turn the motor on and off. It's not very precise, but could be made better and probably less processor intense. I also reproduced some digital sound. I planned to make a simple multichannel player for floppy but never did. (I had made some multichannel music players on ZX Spectrum beeper in the past so this was a natural progression... haha)
In those times I remember some people had Amigas with green monitors and without any speakers. Horrible combination I know, but those were the war years in Croatia and poverty was all around. I was glad to look the expressions on the faces of people who finally heard some sound out of their quiet Amigas.
Enough about me.
There is one other thing perhaps worth emulating. Back in 90s a friend of mine (Rasputin / Semtex) figured out that by using the composite line out more than 16 shades of grey can be shown. As you know the monochromatic picture is mixed out of rgb (definitely better way than lame pc which just pushed the green channel for monochromatic monitors).
Anyway, he made a color table for various shades of grey. I think that he finally found more than a hundred distinct greys. This was not lame at all! He at the time worked on some local television so he used a professional equipment to measure the intensity of greys as Amiga mixed it. And from it he created a table and a program which converted the colored pictures in the appropriate rgb colors which at the end gave more grey tones when seen through composite line. (pictures looked interesting in rgb too!)
I think he would convert the pictures in 32 shades of grey from a palete of hundred and something greys. Now it comes to my mind that he could try to use half-brite to get even more greys simultanously on the screen. Maybe he even did, I don't remember.
Anyway, it was nice to see, and easy too. Just an additional cable connected to a 1084 monitor and by pushing a single switch on the monitor you could toggle the composite/rgb and watch pictures in this "new" mode.