This blog was offline for a while yesterday, and was running slow when it was up. Apparently the reason was an internet-wide attack against WordPress sites, attempting to brute-force the admin passwords, and presumably litter any compromised blogs with spam.
Thankfully I used a nice secure password (Eight asterisks – no-one would *ever* guess that!) and RetroRamblings seems to have been spared any such indignity.
A few days ago I scored an Altera DE2 dev board on EBay for £90. It’s the lower-end model with “only” 35,000 logic elements in the FPGA, but still a worthy addition to the collection.
My first steps down the road that led me here were nearly two years ago now. I brought my old Amiga stuff down from the loft with a view to selling it, since I hadn’t touched it in years. I had an A4000/030 (my pride and joy when I was 17!), an A600 that I’d inherited as payment-in-kind for some programming work, and an A1200 with 50Mhz ‘030 that I’d bought from a friend and then promptly mothballed.
In my defense, I *did* sell the A600.
However, since discovering how active the Retro scene is, and becoming interested in the FPGA recreations of retro systems, I’ve somehow managed to acquire the following cool but ultimately pointless toys!
And far too many FPGA boards, all capable of running a Minimig core of one type or another!
So… I think I can safely call this particular de-cluttering exercise a dismal failure!
My post about the Agent X II theme reminded me of something else that’s interested me for a while. The music in computer games back in the 80s and 90s clearly contained some major pop culture influences, but I wonder how often it was completely subconscious, and how often the composer set out to copy the feel (or even the notes!) of an existing piece of music? We had a much more relaxed attitude to copyright back then!
Anyhow, the influences ranged from the utterly blatant:
cf.
Or the stunning (for 1990) game over music from Shadow of the Beast II on the Amiga, and a piece of incidental music from Miami Vice:
But sometimes it was a little more subtle.
Take for example, Rob Hubbard’s C64 music for One Man and His Droid: Listen to the section 3:05 into this:
and compare with the passage 2 minutes 40 seconds into this:
Of course, sometimes it works in the opposite direction!
So how many more examples are there?
After such a dry, technical post, here’s something a bit lighter: more videogame music from my childhood!
This was Tim Follin’s masterpiece from the Commodore 64 version of Agent X II. I’ve always loved the eccentric rhythms in this. (Also, listen out for a reference – perhaps accidental? – to Rutter’s ‘Shepherd’s Pipe Carol’ towards the end.)
Since I’ve been asked just how difficult it is to port a PACE arcade machine to the Chameleon, I figured a worked example would be useful! So what I’m going to do is document the process of getting Galaxian up an running. I’m going to assume you’re using Linux here. It’s all equally possible on Windows, but you’ll need to deal with things like getting an SVN client up and running, and I’m afraid I can’t help with that.
The first thing you need is a copy of the current PACE repository (Revision 1402 at the time of writing), so from a terminal, type:
svn checkout https://svn.pacedev.net/repos/pace
Continue reading
The latest addition to the line-up of PACE cores with Chameleon 64 builds is Pengo!
For the impatient, binaries for the Chameleon 64 can be found here!
Continue reading
I received an email a few days ago asking whether I still support the FreeWheel utility. This is something I wrote back in the mists of time to provide mouse wheel support for the Amiga. It wasn’t a mouse driver as such, instead it set up an input handler that watched for “Newmouse” events, and attempted to translate them into keypresses or slider nudges, or whatever was appropriate for the window currently under the cursor.
The other nice thing FreeWheel could do was to adjust the mouse speed in very fine increments. Instead of merely multiplying mouse movements by an integer constant, it multiplied by a fractional amount, and maintained a remainder, so if you wanted your mouse to be 23% faster, FreeWheel could oblige.
The requested change was simply to provide a 68000-compatible build, since the build on Aminet was for 68020+ only, and as it happens this was a really easy request to fulfil, so… some 14 years after the first release on Aminet, a new build is now available!
http://aminet.net/util/mouse/FreeWheel.lha
After I ported the Pacman core to the Chameleon 64 last week, Mark McDougall suggested that Moon Patrol would be a good project to port next, so that’s exactly what I’ve done.
I’ve also improved the Pacman port somewhat, cleaned up the clocking arrangments (now I have a clearer idea of how they’re supposed to work) and integrated the Chameleon_CDTV entity, which means the CDTV infra-red controller can now be used.
I’ve also ported Moon Patrol to the MiST board, and to my Frankensteined C3 board.
The downside of Moon Patrol is that it requires a two-button controller, since one is used for fire and the other for jump.
Binaries for the Chameleon64 can be found here, while a patch against current PACE SVN can be found here.
Having seen the PACE project’s Pacman core running on the MiST board, I wanted to try and get it running on the Chameleon. This task is made much easier by the existence of Peter Wendrich’s Chameleon_io entity, which abstracts away the messy details of reading the C64’s or Docking Station’s joystick ports.
This is just a quick-and-dirty port, but should be playable. The coin switch is mapped to the leftmost button on the Chameleon, while the start button is the middle button.
To play, you’ll need a joystick in C64 port 1, or attached to the docking station. (So far I’ve only tested with a real C64.)
The core can be found here.
Source code (in patch form against today’s PACE SVN) can be found here. Because I used Till Harbaum’s port to the MiST board as a starting point the patch adds support for his board as well, and also my Cyclone-3-board-from-EBay.
Edit: Future me, nearly 10 years later, says don’t bother attempting these steps unless you really have no alternative. My comment below about guides found on the net quickly becoming obsolete now applies to this post!
If you’re using Ubuntu or a derivative, then the arm-none-eabi-… toolchain is now in the repos, so can easily be installed with apt, and there’s even an m68k gcc cross compiler too.
<Historical content resumes…>
To build the OSD firmware for the Minimig projects, a cross-compilation environment is needed. Configuring GCC for this task can be an arcane process, and aspects tend to change from time to time, so guides found on the net quickly become obsolete. For instance, guides recommending the target “arm-elf” will fail with the latest GCC. Instead we need to use the target “arm-none-eabi”.
Here’s how I built a toolchain for building both M68K (Chameleon Minimig port) and ARM (Original Minimig and MiST) versions of the firmware:
Continue reading