If you were to put a graphics chip on an apple II card...

[aiia...@gmail.com]

What would it be?

I know about the Arcade board, etc. Second Sight, TurboRez. They never caught on. Way too late for anything to be popular today...

I've been studying a NES (nintendo) ROM disassembly, and I think the graphics chip is pretty freakin neat.

Have you guys worked with any other graphics IC's? What would be a good one for a *hobby* project?

Rich

[Steve Nickolas]

I thought of the TMS-9918...

-uso.

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 11:21:29 AM UTC-7, Steve Nickolas wrote:

TMS-9918:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9918

NES PPU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Processing_Unit

[Michael J. Mahon]

And the 9918 is on the Arcade Board.

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:22:12 PM UTC-7, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> > TMS-9918:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9918

>
> And the 9918 is on the Arcade Board.
>

I am curious how many of the Apple II graphics cards were sold. Were there any commercial softwares available for these cards, besides the included demo programs?

Rich

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:22:12 PM UTC-7, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> > TMS-9918:
>
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9918
>

> And the 9918 is on the Arcade Board.
>

Arcade Board with 9918:
http://apple2info.net/hardware/arcadeboard/arcadeboard.htm

The Arcade Board uses the same Video Display Processor as SuperSprite:
http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n2/40_A_new_way_to_do_graphics_.php

On this one too:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/video/Hi-Res%20Graphics%20TMS9918_BYTE%200882.pdf

Looks like a good one to start with. The Byte card looks simple enough..

Rich

[Sean Fahey]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 7:03:04 PM UTC-5, (unknown) wrote:

> Looks like a good one to start with. The Byte card looks simple enough..

Would it be possible to combine the Byte Card with an audio card (similar to the Arcade Board) except something more popular that had software written for it - like the Mockingboard?

[Kevin]

the problem is hardly anything used an external VDG, the good ole TMS9918 (or my choice the YPbPr output TMS9928) works great if your system is standard for it, otherwise its a niche ... how many apple games use it? will you break compatibility with people who dont have it (ie I only have a //c) if you dont meet the two requirements above what good IS it?

[Steve Nickolas]

Makes sense.

The 9918 was used in the Colecovision and the original MSX, and
descendents were used in various Sega systems.

-uso.

[Michael J. Mahon]

This is the "critical mass" problem at the root of any system enhancement.
Unless a large fraction of the market adopts it, there is no business case
for doing extra work to support/exploit it.

This is why most successful system enhancements are introduced by the
manufacturer, by making them standard equipment for new models.

Of course, those days are over for the Apple II--and it is barely an
economic market these days. So now what drives adoption of an enhancement
is major convenience (think CFFA) or necessity (no real examples).

[Winston19842005]

On 8/30/12 12:09 AM, in article
ad4e41f1-e741-4059...@googlegroups.com, "Kevin"

How about this?
http://codehackcreate.com/store#ecwid:category=0&mode=product&product=140221
76
F18A, a TMS9918A replacement with many advances.
If you have an account on AtariAge, you can find out much more.

Some I can recall:
80 columns available
overlaid bitmap
remove 4 sprites per line limit
output to a standard VGA monitor
640x480 resolution

[Winston19842005]

On 8/30/12 6:42 AM, in article CC64BBED.1DD91%winston...@yahoo.com,

Guess I could've mentioned it is a drop-in replacement. So if you already
have a board, like the SuperSprite, you could replace the chip with this
perhaps?

[Peter Neubauer]

I just bought an F18A with the intent of interfacing it to an Apple II. The hardware interfacing should be very simple since the F18A incorporates video RAM, video output, and clock generation. I recently wrote a bit about sprite boards here: http://www.bluerwhite.org/2012/08/sprite-boards/

I'm very interested in finding Apple II software that support the TMS9918A.

Thanks,
-Peter

[Steve Nickolas]

I'd like to see some made, if even just porting stuff from the MSX,
SG-1000 and Colecovision (all, unfortunately, Z80)...

-uso.

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:18:09 AM UTC-7, Peter Neubauer wrote:
> I just bought an F18A with the intent of interfacing it to an Apple II. The hardware interfacing should be very simple since the F18A incorporates video RAM, video output, and clock generation. I recently wrote a bit about sprite boards here: http://www.bluerwhite.org/2012/08/sprite-boards/
>

Recent? You mean yesterday?

In FPGA ColecoVision 2.1, found via google, has VHDL code for the TMS 9918, and I am going to make it my first "big" carte blanche project. I need to get back home and get my dev boards and computers!

Rich

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:29:33 AM UTC-7, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> I'd like to see some made, if even just porting stuff from the MSX,
>
> SG-1000 and Colecovision (all, unfortunately, Z80)...
>

I was thinking the same. I wonder if Any of the z80 cards would be able to access the 9918 through the apple II bus at any reasonable speed? Or maybe the 9918 would be better off on a card with a Z80?


Rich

[aiia...@gmail.com]

Possible? Anything.

The 9918 doesn't need any address decoding, it has device select and RW which can be derived from the Apple II bus using simple 74xx logic. There is no ROM.

Mockingboard... I think it uses 6522 interface chip? That wouldn't need any address decoding either.

all the cores are available for free. Need CB here to play.

I want to do this for hobby project. It would be nice if we could port software from another computer that uses the chip. A game engine and sprite editor would be great.

[Steve Nickolas]

Dunno. But a SoftCard is only 5/7 the speed of any of these systems,
iirc. (That said, I think the 6502 can keep up if the game is recoded to
take advantage of it.)

I actually was thinking a few days ago how it would be nice to implement a
hybrid video/sound card using the TMS-9918 and the AY-8910 (Mockingboard
and MSX sound chip). A system with a 9918 card, a Mockingboard and a
joystick would be real nice... with a Zip Chip, a V9938, an AY-8910, a
joystick, a Liron and a 1 MB RAM expander, you'd about have the king of
8-bitters.

-uso.

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:59:26 AM UTC-7, (unknown) wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 6:58:37 PM UTC-7, Sean Fahey wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 7:03:04 PM UTC-5, (unknown) wrote:
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > > Looks like a good one to start with. The Byte card looks simple enough..
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > Would it be possible to combine the Byte Card with an audio card (similar to the Arcade Board) except something more popular that had software written for it - like the Mockingboard?
>
>
>
> Possible? Anything.
>
>
>
> The 9918 doesn't need any address decoding, it has device select and RW which can be derived from the Apple II bus using simple 74xx logic. There is no ROM.
>
>
>
> Mockingboard... I think it uses 6522 interface chip? That wouldn't need any address decoding either.

Yes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mockingboard_V1.jpg

Would be interesting to know how Arcade Board/ SuperSprite would address the chips seperately on a single card. I haven't looked at the 6522 datasheet in a while.

Rich

[Peter Neubauer]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 10:32:07 AM UTC-6, (unknown) wrote:

>
> Recent? You mean yesterday?
>

No ... I got my F18A a month ago, but I haven't gotten around to using it yet.

[aiia...@gmail.com]

I meant the article with date of 29 aug 2012.

Where is the order page for F18A? I can't find it anywhere

Rich

[Michael Black]

So you'd sort of have an MSX computer.

Michael

[Raymond Wiker]

I found this:

http://codehackcreate.com/store

[Steve Nickolas]

Yeah. An MSX-2 with a faster and incompatible CPU.

-uso.

[Sean Fahey]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:18:09 AM UTC-5, Peter Neubauer wrote:

> I just bought an F18A with the intent of interfacing it to an Apple II.

Navy Surplus? (I'm kidding!)

[Michael J. Mahon]

Address decoding is actually trivial for peripheral cards, since $Csxx
space is already decoded and there are only 8 address bits to worry about.
Incomplete decoding is quite common, as with the 2x6522 Mockingboard.

You'd want to keep the Mockingboard interface, since it actually has a
software base, and you could put the 9918/F18A in /devsel space, not having
to be compatible with anything.

The one real PITA with the 9918 is that any access to its RAM must be done
indirectly by setting 9918 registers, which *really* slows things down.
BTW, that was the *only* access to RAM in the TI 99 series!

[Michael Black]

Not if it works with the Z80 card, unless I'm forgetting and MSX required
an 8080.

Michael

[Steve Nickolas]

3.58 MHz Z80

-uso.

[Winston19842005]

On 8/30/12 4:17 PM, in article
1055568968368050112....@news.giganews.com, "Michael J.
Mahon" <mjm...@aol.com> wrote:
<snip>

>
> The one real PITA with the 9918 is that any access to its RAM must be done
> indirectly by setting 9918 registers, which *really* slows things down.
> BTW, that was the *only* access to RAM in the TI 99 series!
>
> -michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

No, the TI-99 had a 64k address space, with the common expanded TI having
32k (24k at $A000, 8k at $2000). The console only had 256 bytes of CPU RAM,
with 16k RAM for the 9918 that could only be accessed through the 9918.

32k boxes/cards were available. I won't mention GROM. Oops, I did, just
forget I said that...

As for the 9918 being slow... hard to argue... but the F18A does not have
these issues. You can't outrun it with a standard processor from that time
period.

Setting the VDP address registers allow you to read/write consecutive bytes
in VDP RAM without changing the address register.

Ben

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 5:03:04 PM UTC-7, (unknown) wrote:
>
> ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/video/Hi-Res%20Graphics%20TMS9918_BYTE%200882.pdf
>
> Looks like a good one to start with. The Byte card looks simple enough..
>
>
>
> Rich

here's the story behind it:

http://www.trs-80.org/interview-paul-andreasen/

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 11:20:14 AM UTC-7, (unknown) wrote:
> What would it be?
>
>
>
> I know about the Arcade board, etc.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sy8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA138&ots=R1G1CIahAt&dq=sprite-1%20sprite-2%20synetix&pg=PA138#v=onepage&q=sprite-1%20sprite-2%20synetix&f=false

[Michael J. Mahon]

Hmmm. Well, it's certainly clear that his memory has faded a bit... ;-)

The two-part article he refers to was in 80 Micro, not Byte.

And, BTW, the design of the Circuit Cellar 9918 board is almost exactly the
standard "appnote" diagram, so no invention was evident at all. It is
particularly simple because the Apple II already has great I/O decoding.
It's a 9918, DRAM, and an octal transceiver! And the software support is
provided by TMS Logo.

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:29:33 AM UTC-7, Steve Nickolas wrote:

> I'd like to see some made, if even just porting stuff from the MSX,
>
> SG-1000 and Colecovision (all, unfortunately, Z80)...
>

From Cybernoid disk image on asimov: (not 4.0 version)

So as a little R&D proj, I thought I'd convert Dave Rogers' Spectrum
128 Cybernoid routine (written in 1988).

After this, I wrote a python script to do the Z80->6502, and quickly
converted Cybernoid-II.

Rich

[Steve Nickolas]

Well, I got a handful of MSX ROMs on hand that might be worth trying to
mod. 8K, 16K, 32K. Though I wouldn't be able to test such a port yet.

-uso.

[BLuRry]

That's why I'm going for a new music format. I always though the music replayer methodology of using a CPU emulation was kind of BS compared to a pure music format the likes of a mod or similar. I get why the msx and speccy music emulators use cpu emulation to accomplish the goal, mostly for timing but also because it's easier to rip out a music routine than convert the data to a new format. But I still don't agree with it because of its lack of portability.

I'm still working on WozTracker, but have a lot of real-life distractions this past week. Hopefully I'll be able to carve out a good chunk of time to work -more on it this week though. I have 50% of the backend tracker data structures written for the editor. The rest of the editor will be built around these so I'm trying to be careful to get everything I need in the first pass rather than go through a more expensive revision process later.

-B

[aiia...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, September 9, 2012 8:18:05 PM UTC-7, BLuRry wrote:
>
> That's why I'm going for a new music format. I always though the music replayer methodology of using a CPU emulation was kind of BS compared to a pure music format the likes of a mod or similar. I get why the msx and speccy music emulators use cpu emulation to accomplish the goal, mostly for timing but also because it's easier to rip out a music routine than convert the data to a new format. But I still don't agree with it because of its lack of portability.
>

I understand the problem now, and why you are doing the new format..
Will you have an interrupt driven player planned for it?

Looking on the net I can't find any AY8910 players for the apple II. A few of the music editors will output to the card, but only with the editor loaded.

Rich

[BLuRry]

yes, a new editor will be absolutely necessary. But I don't have the time to write it in 6502 or fit its display into the constraints of 560x192. The editor will be a java swing program and it will use internals of Jace for playback. The actual playback engine is an embedded apple //e emulator, actually a running copy of Jace without the video or keyboard attached. And instead of the Apple // rom it will jump straight into the replayer routine on start.

The replayer is interrupt-driven. I only want to write one playback function, so the editor will be an embedded test of the replayer and vice versa.

;-)

Again, not a lot of progress in the last two days. It's a long story and it probably requires beer to retell. But spare time permitting I will have something to show for my efforts in the near future.

-B

[Daniel Kruszyna]

BLuRry <brendan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That's why I'm going for a new music format. I always though the
> music replayer methodology of using a CPU emulation was kind of BS
> compared to a pure music format the likes of a mod or similar. I get
> why the msx and speccy music emulators use cpu emulation to accomplish
> the goal, mostly for timing but also because it's easier to rip out a
> music routine than convert the data to a new format. But I still
> don't agree with it because of its lack of portability.

The purpose of these replayers is to play music that has already been
written as accurately as is reasonable. In the case of 1bit music, the
CPU _is_ the sound chip. I see nothing inferior about this approach. In
fact, I would love if someone added Apple II support to the
Game_Music_Emu library:

http://www.slack.net/~ant/libs/audio.html

-- Daniel

[Roy Miller]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:20:14 PM UTC-5, (unknown) wrote:
> What would it be?
>
>
>

> I know about the Arcade board, etc. Second Sight, TurboRez. They never caught on. Way too late for anything to be popular today...
>
>
>
> I've been studying a NES (nintendo) ROM disassembly, and I think the graphics chip is pretty freakin neat.
>
>
>
> Have you guys worked with any other graphics IC's? What would be a good one for a *hobby* project?
>
>
>
> Rich

I think there is an article in Byte about making a TMS - 9918 video card for the Apple II.

I know there is one about using the sound chip from the TI 99/4a for a sound card.

If both could be put on the same card, there would be a use for old TI 99/4as -

[Steve Nickolas]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Roy Miller wrote:

> I think there is an article in Byte about making a TMS - 9918 video card
> for the Apple II.
>
> I know there is one about using the sound chip from the TI 99/4a for a
> sound card.
>
> If both could be put on the same card, there would be a use for old TI
> 99/4as -

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell...

99/4a uses what, the SN76489 (like the ColecoVision and the Tandy 1000)?

There was a daughtercard for the Apple ][ that had a 9918 coupled with an
AY-8910. I'd like to see a clone of *this* - porting games over from the
MSX to it would give it a good starter library.

-uso.

[winston...@yahoo.com]

Please leave the old 99/4A's alone, for us TIers sakes!
You can buy a new FPGA version of the 9918A (just read the older messages!) and the AY-8910 is a better sound chip!