Weeknight 'Virtual' Dev session #5, Thursday 22nd October 2020, 7pm - 10pm

[Arcadian]

As the new games and demo coding sections of the forum are currently very active, we are now hosting weeknight "Dev sessions" on Zoom, that are primarily focused on the development of new games and graphics/music demos for Acorn computers as well as development tools, emulators and debuggers.

They take place the week in-between the 2 x Tuesday night 'general' sessions on the Thursday evening, between 7pm and 10pm.

The sessions are intended for developers to share progress updates and request/offer help and feedback. We hope that these sessions will help motivate and encourage developers to see projects through to completion.

Just to be clear - these sessions are open to everyone: programmers, graphics artists and musicians, even if you've just got an interest/appreciation of - or ideas for - new games and demos, please come along for moral support - there may be opportunities to beta-test new versions of upcoming projects . There really isn't a limit to the number of places available - well, the maximum we can host in a Zoom meeting is 100 but it's unlikely we'll ever get anywhere near that figure!

If there are any issues you'd like help with - or would like to demonstrate something - please leave details in the thread and we'll add them to the lists of items to be covered.

If you are new to Zoom, forum member JudgeBeeb has written a handy guide to getting set up and logged in.


Schedule (As was)
19:00 - 19:30 Open - Help needed/offered
19:30 - 19:45 Creating graphics in The Graphic Adventure Creator (Arcadian/pixelblip)
19:45 - 20:00 Building MAME (Pernod/Tricky)
20:00 - 20:30 Demo: Beeb816 (revaldhinho)
20:30 - 21:15 Masterclass: How to program VideoNuLA (RobC) *RECORDED*
21:15 - 21:30 Demo: Nanogangs (Tom Williamson)
21:30 - 21:45 Update: Elementum (0xC0DE)
21:45 - 22:00 Update: Pooyan (Snuggsy187)
22:00 - 22:15 Update: Subtilis' Assembler (MarkDRyan)


Attended

1. Arcadian (Dave).
2. tricky (Richard).
3. dudleysoft71 (James).
4. markdryan (Mark).
5. Snuggsy187 (Neil).
6. BigEd (Ed).
7. RobC (Rob).
8. Revaldinho (Rich).
9. 0xC0DE (Kelvin).
10. spanners (David).
11. oss003 (Kees).
12. chrisn (Chris).
13. flibble (Peter).
14. pixelblip (Mike).
15. picosonic (Jasper).
16. trixster (Andy).
17. dp11 (Dominic).
18. Leonardo (Leonardo).
19. naomasa298 (Shane).
20. sPhilMainwaring (Phil).
21. Julie (Julie).
22. JIM (James).

Invited

1. Zarchos (Xavier). [discord]
2. z0m8ied0g (Stephen).

[tricky]

I should be OK.

[kieranhj]

Unfortunately (well, fortunate for me) I'm away on holiday on that Thursday. I will endeavour to attend the following session in November and maybe even see if I can get the CRTC Registers masterclass together by then.

[dudleysoft71]

Hopefully I should be able to attend this time. Not sure if I'll have anything new by then, been busy with work.

[Snuggsy187]

Should be ok for this one !

Pooyan's took a backseat in place of a holiday , so may not have too much to report...... We'll see !

[markdryan]

Me please. With a bit of luck I'll be able to demo Subtilis' assembler by then.

[z0m8ied0g]

Please put me down for this, i'll try and make it but it depends.

[BigEd]

I'm in! (Please. Thank you.)

[RobC]

I should be able to join too.

Thanks,

Rob

[Revaldinho]

I'd like to join too if there's space.

R

[0xC0DE]

I would like to join.

I can give a demo of Elementum, my platformer for Elk/Beeb.

And I need ideas/tools on how even someone like me can compose a simple tune for my game. Max 2 channels. Will be arpeggiated at 50Hz on the Elk in order to emulate 2 channels.

[spanners]

Will try to make it.

D.

[Arcadian]

List updated up to here

Unfortunately (well, fortunate for me) I'm away on holiday on that Thursday. I will endeavour to attend the following session in November and maybe even see if I can get the CRTC Registers masterclass together by then.

Enjoy! And thanks for the 2 x MC's delivered so far!

In the Master Class this Thursday, Rob C will present "How to program VideoNuLA - programming the palette, modifying existing games to use extra colours, horizontal scrolling and attribute modes."

[oss003]

Can you add me to the list please ......
Thanks

Greetings
Kees

[chrisn]

Please put my name down too. Thanks!

[flibble]

Yes please provisionally, I may have another call to be on some of that night too.

[Snuggsy187]

Just got a little show and tell for tomorrow night if I can have 10 minutes - nothing amazing - just a Pooyan sanity check on multiple IRQ timers and bucket printing, plus maybe something I've been distracted on for the last two days.......

[BigEd]

Could @revaldhinho and I have ten minutes of your time? We'd like to present the beeb816 accelerator and ask the assembled devs what they make of it. Does a faster beeb appeal to you, either as a thing in itself or a faster host for a fast second processor? Would you use or develop for a faster beeb? Any interest in developing 65816 code (16 bit operations and massive memory space)?

At present beeb816 is only a prototype, and we might only hope for the success of, say, VideoNuLA, but we think it should make for an interestingly capable platform. And it might catch on...

[pixelblip]

I might try and pop along tonight .....not usually my thing but why not....hope to see you there if only just to listen
Thanks
Mike

[picosonic]

I’d like to join please. But it’ll be after 8

[Arcadian]

Calendar invites sent to everyone who's requested them, please post here if you didn't receive them.

[Arcadian]

Schedule:

19:00 - 19:45 Open - Help needed/offered
19:45 - 20:00 Demo: Beeb816 (revaldhinho)
20:00 - 20:15 Open - General chat
20:15 - 21:00 Masterclass: How to program VideoNuLA (RobC) *RECORDED*
21:00 - 21:15 Demo: Nanogangs (Tom Williamson)
21:15 - 21:30 Update: Elementum (0xC0DE)
21:30 - 21:45 Update: Pooyan (Snuggsy187)
21:45 - 22:00 Update: Subtilis' Assembler (MarkDRyan)

[tricky]

HELP: Does anyone have a ready build Visual studio project for building MAME?

[Arcadian]

HELP: Does anyone have a ready build Visual studio project for building MAME?

I'll send Pernod the meeting details in case he can help!

Edit: Nigel will pop in at some point ...

Also, I've started the meeting now but may be away for the first 15 mins or so ...

[trixster]

I’ll be along

[markdryan]

I don't seem to have an invite to the meeting. Could someone PM me the zoom details?

[Arcadian]

Oops I don't know how that happened sorry Mark, I've issued them via Calendar Invite

[Arcadian]

Thanks to Rob for the Masterclass and to everyone else that joined in, really enjoyed the session.

Next Dev night is Thurs 12th November and the sign up thread is here.

[Revaldinho]

Mark asked about the Beeb816 speed up for the Raytrace program running on PiTubeDirect's native Arm copro.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19280&start=30#p272781

On my BBC B with Pi3A+ I got 13.8s

Enabling Beeb816 @ 14MHz to accelerate the host, that came down to 2.8s for about a 5x speed up.

R

[markdryan]

Mark asked about the Beeb816 speed up for the Raytrace program running on PiTubeDirect's native Arm copro.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19280&start=30#p272781

On my BBC B with Pi3A+ I got 13.8s

Enabling Beeb816 @ 14MHz to accelerate the host, that came down to 2.8s for about a 5x speed up.

Now that must be a sight to behold. I really want a Beeb816 now!.

When I benchmarked this on my PiZero a few months ago I concluded that the maths were taking about 3 seconds. So it seems like you must have removed almost all of the overhead of drawing over the tube, which is fantastic. I'm going to start adding VFP support to Subtilis (which can already compile a slightly modified version of the raytrace example) soon. This should hopefully help with the remaining 2.8s.