ABUG Dev night #28, Thursday 21st October 2021, 7pm - 10pm (BST)

[BigEd]

On Thursday, which is presently tomorrow, there will be an ABUG Dev night, at 7, on zoom. (Once again, although hopefully this is relatively rare, I won't be there until 9ish, but hopefully hosts will appear by magic and goodwill.)

Come and discuss your Acorn-related dev projects, whether they be creating things, breaking things, or digging into things. Or even if your project is stuck... and if you haven't got a project, come along to hear about what's going on. Because somewhere, surely, someone has been doing something mighty interesting.

Hardware, software, tooling, emulators, games - all kinds of development, debugging, reverse engineering and investigation are on topic.

For a flavour of a typical meeting, see this previous thread.

For a bit of a heads-up nearer the time, subscribe to this thread using the spanner gadget below. I'll bump this thread the day before and on the day, if I remember.

(We're no longer sending out calendar invitations, so be sure to manage your own calendar! Keep an eye on this thread for dates:

• Upcoming Thursday Dev Nights & Tuesday "General" sessions

)

[TimoHartong]

Hi ,

I'm interrested could you send me the credentials for the zoom meeting ?. Unfortenately I will be later as well. But I can talk about some things I did with the API from the Wi-Fi card for Roland for the electron.

[BigEd]

(PM sent)

[TimoHartong]

Thanks I think it is 21 oktober 2021

[BigEd]

oops! fixed...

[BigEd]

Tonight at 7!

[TimoHartong]

Yep I'm already logged in ( I hope )

[oss003]

Yep I'm already logged in ( I hope )

That's 20:00h Dutch time ....

Greetings
Kees

[TimoHartong]

I'm in the UK ...

[tricky]

Sorry I missed it, had my third jab and forgot about ABUG!

[BigEd]

I can't believe anyone could forget about ABUG! But there'll be another one along shortly...

[TimoHartong]

It had a great attendance of people from the Netherlands....Kees thanks for the assembly routines

[markdryan]

It had a great attendance of people from the Netherlands....Kees thanks for the assembly routines

Correct. At one point in the call, 50% of the attendees were resident in the Netherlands. There were 11 attendees in total and topics discussed included; NTP on the electron with the ElkWifi card, a patched BeebEM capable of running tricky's Starwars Speech demo, the state of support for 32 bit Acorn computers in MAME, historical ports of RiscOS 4 to post Acorn machines, string based mathematics in BASIC, function pointers and higher order functions in Subtilis, a new chunky 8x10 font, PiTube Direct's 6502 JITer and HDMI output on PiTube Direct. I've a suspicion that there were more topics discussed that I've forgotten. That will teach me to wait 3 days before posting the summary. In anycase, another very enjoyable evening with lots of discussion and no akward silences! Thanks to all who attended and contributed.

[tricky]

I'm sorry that I missed it.
Was it my beebem playing the speech, or is there another patched version now?

[markdryan]

Was it my beebem playing the speech, or is there another patched version now?

It was a BeebEm built from Chris's local development branch I think. There was also an interesting explanation of what the problem was, but unfortunately, I don't know enough about BeebEM nor can I recall enough of the explanation to reproduce it here. Now I think of it, there was also a demo of the speech in AstroBlaster working on this new BeebEm build (although there was a slight graphical glitch when the speech played).

[tricky]

Thanks Ed Mark for the info.
There is sampled speech if the speech chip isn't found, which pauses the game while it plays. It should say at the bottom of the loading screen if it found a speech chip.

PS Thanks Ed for all you do for our community.

[chrisn]

The demo was of one of my BeebEm development builds, so based on the latest 4.17 release but with the TMS5220 speech emulation re-added. The Star Wars demo sprang into life once I'd added emulation of the read select line (via IC32).

WIth AstroBlaster the speech sounds OK, if a bit loud compared to the game sounds effects. But while the speech is in use the game status panel at the bottom of the screen occasionally jumps to the top of the screen. So it looks there's something causing AstroBlaster video timing to go wrong. I'll see if I can capture a video demo.

The other thing I noticed is that under BeebEm, AstroBlaster only detects 1 SWR bank available, even if there are more configured as RAM. Will AstroBlaster use more than one bank for additional speech?

[tricky]

It uses less than 6K for all of the speech in the arcade game, so doesn't really need any more
Astro Blaster isn't tuned for beebem with speech, but doesn't jump on my beebem or real HW, so I expect it is just beebem off by a couple of cycles.
There is what I think it's a timing sensitive but where the ship gives a little wiggle at startup and then hands when you push fire to start.