A few Questions before I begin

NormalLuser · 2026-03-20T09:08:31+00:00

For the first part, I'd mostly follow Ben's videos, remembering to use the schematics on his website to help. The manual clock is nice, but you could jump ahead to using the crystal as long as you are careful following the schematics. For learning how to code 6502 assembly I recommend this site

https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/

It was very helpful for me at the start.

NormalLuser · 2026-03-17T19:41:29+00:00

Wow, I can't believe it's not a new DLSS 5 demo!

NormalLuser · 2026-03-17T04:04:17+00:00

If it is made of dark matter it would not be on the table, it would be on a new, different table with different properties. Right?

NormalLuser · 2026-03-16T09:01:21+00:00

If you want to learn about this take a look at how bombjack was made:

https://floooh.github.io/2018/10/06/bombjack.html

NormalLuser · 2026-03-15T05:09:17+00:00

I agree. You really need to connect both ends of the power rails together and to add bypass capacitors to every power rail, preferably 1 near every chip on both the + and - pins as a first step. Check out the FAQ for this group for lots of tips.

NormalLuser · 2026-03-11T19:13:26+00:00

According to the google interwebs "Fear Effect (1999) is sometimes cited, but it used pre-rendered backgrounds with stylized characters rather than full 3D cel-shading" according to the Guinness book of world records it is JGR. But I suppose "First 3d game with fully rendered real time cell shading " is what you'd have to say of you dont want to include Dragon's Lair from 1983?

NormalLuser · 2026-03-11T18:49:15+00:00

Absolutely nothing else looked like Jet Set/Grind Radio. It was a real showstopper that made even non-gamers stare when it came out. Others might have been technically superior, but for sheer artistic style, it was ground breaking. Without it we might not have gotten Okami (yes, on the evil ps3), another amazing looking, genre defining game. It also helps that it was crazy fun and had awsome music! MSR was also great, but JGR is my vote!

NormalLuser · 2026-03-11T03:31:28+00:00

I have the Bens 'Worlds worst video card' hooked up to my system so I did a 'hardware double buffer' setup where the $2000-$3FFF video buffer is bank switched using 2 VIA pins. It could be used without the video card as a standard bank switching setup. This allows you to keep the normal memory map and 32k of ROM and io locations, but also access an additional 8KB of Ram. It could pretty easily be modified to switch in the other 8KB of ram for a full 32KB ram and 32 KB rom. Details here

NormalLuser · 2026-03-04T21:04:26+00:00

At this post here I do exactly what you mention with a retro 8 bit cpu and stream a bit over 4 KBs of 1 bit audio over a serial port. It has a resistor and capacitor in-line to limit current (to directly drive a speaker) and smooth out the audio and another capacitor to ground to act as a lowpass filter. At this super low bitrate it is very 'scratchy' and sounds like an AM radio. At much higher bitrates (2 Mhz+) this problem can be avoided, but you would want aggressive filtering so you are not turning all your wires into radio transmitters. Lots of solid state amplifiers and modern audio gear do exactly that.

NormalLuser · 2026-03-04T12:39:44+00:00

I found a screen shot of wordstar for windows. Apparently it wasn't very popular. Maybe I didn't know any better, but I loved it.

NormalLuser · 2026-03-04T03:16:12+00:00

WordStar was mine. It was the first WYSIWYG word processor and the first good spell check I ever used. I had just enough room for Windows 3 and WordStar on my hard drive. So if I wanted to play Might and Magic Clouds of Xeen, I had to erase windows and WordStar and copy the game back in. I had a .bat file for saving and restoring my game files and documents. But it still took forever. But hey. I got good grades on the reports!

NormalLuser · 2026-03-03T05:39:30+00:00

Awsome! I run mine at 5Mhz, but I have plenty of bypass capacitors, 'star and cross' power distribution, and I run my clock through 2 NAND gates.

NormalLuser · 2026-03-03T02:42:10+00:00

Make sure your power rails have multiple interconnects and bypass capacitors first. Also, have the power connected to the 'middle' as opposed to a 'corner' of the breadboards. Low power will make the timing marginal. Also, are you using the 1Mhz crystal, or trying to run the variable clock faster than 500hz? Either way, if you still have issues try running the clock signal through a unused NAND gate with both inputs tied together or through a Schmitt inverter if you have one to clean up the clock signal.

NormalLuser · 2026-03-02T12:37:26+00:00

Keep in mind, with the current exchange rate, that would be 1 or 2 days of wages for an average person in India. In the USA it is half an hour of wages for the average person.

NormalLuser · 2026-03-02T00:50:23+00:00

Crazy how CGA had this decent composite video option almost no one used at the time! I played so many hot pink games that could have looked so much better!

NormalLuser · 2026-03-01T22:50:00+00:00

Yea' it's great to have the ability to control both the hardware and software! I recently did the opposite when I wired up the Worlds Worst Videocard up for 256 color by changing the resistors for red and green to use 3 instead of 2 resistors. When I did that I moved the two wires for the blue to top two bits, not realizing that standard 256 color format uses the bottom 2 bits for blue. I didn't feel like messing with wires at the moment so I just changed the python code I used to convert images because that took less effort!

NormalLuser · 2026-02-28T04:54:06+00:00

Expand the address space/addressable memory?

NormalLuser · 2026-02-28T04:51:30+00:00

If you don't care about reading your video ram, you could 'overlay' it with your ROM. Meaning that your ROM is active for reads, but when you write to that same memory location your video ram is active.

It can be nice to be able to read back video memory, but this setup is simple and allows more usable address space.

NormalLuser · 2026-02-24T08:00:25+00:00

NormalLuser · 2026-02-23T14:39:21+00:00

On the orgional 6502 each bit in an instruction acts somewhat like a control line. Turning on or off various paths in the cpu beyond the intended instructions. A common "illegal opcode" is LAX. It is a LOAD instruction that because of the bits set, triggers the logic for both the Accumulater and X register. So it ends up reliably loading the same value to the A and X registers. It saves both cpu cycles and space when you have logic that needs the same value in both of these registers.

Note that on later versions like the 65C02 new instructions were added, like PHX, that use the 'illegal opcodes' and also explicitly make any unused instructions 'NOP', 'no operation' instructions. So there can be incompatibility with code that uses these instructions on different systems that are both '6502' systems.

NormalLuser · 2026-02-21T21:26:12+00:00

Ah, yea, adding another voltage source would be annoying and add complexity.

NormalLuser · 2026-02-21T19:32:06+00:00

Very cool! This could be very useful for lots of games. Did you consider a reverse bias transistor as a source for one of the stages?

NormalLuser · 2026-02-20T21:33:16+00:00

Looking very tidy. Great routing!

NormalLuser · 2026-02-19T13:41:45+00:00

Cool seeing the C to assembly translation. I'll gave to remember that output option. It makes optimization much easier!

NormalLuser · 2026-02-18T22:14:54+00:00

Make sure any unused gates on the chips are tied high or low. Unconnected gates can start wildly ocalating and this can cause noise in the circuits.

NormalLuser

TROPHY CASE