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Re: Apple emulators that support "floating bus" video sensing?



sicklittlemonkey wrote:
On Mar 18, 4:20 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:

I think AppleWin may work on the PC, but if it accelerates the "virtual
video" as it accelerates the processor, then it may not.

All the reasonable uses I can think of for video sensing and VBL sensing
are related to an absolute time base, and should not be subject to
acceleration (just as it is not in a real Apple II), but I'm not sure
that emulator writers agree...


AppleWin, probably like most emulators, accelerates the CPU by running
the whole machine at a faster clock. That includes the bus and
therefore memory reads - which in the case of floating bus reads would
mean software-percieved accelerated video generation.

Even if video rendering is decoupled from the accelerated emulation,
the floating bus reads would be accelerated and not suitable for your
purposes.

So, this is actually an emulation bug.

If we assume that the emulator is supposed to emulate an Apple II
with an accelerated *processor*, then the emulated cycle count should
be divided by the acceleration ratio before being used to compute the
current "phantom" video byte.

As it is, it emulates an Apple II with both the processor and the
video refresh accelerated--and there is no such beast!

What I'd like to know is which emulators *do* keep the emulated video
period at 1/60th second (or 1/50th for PAL ;-).


Again, Virtual ][ is the only other one that I know of.

I wonder how widely used it is--and on which platform?  (I've never
used it.)

-michael

NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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