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Re: Some place else to download a2gameserver?
BLuRry wrote:
Might be a good idea to check the code being run to make sure that
it is 6502-compatible...
Yes, it is. I even changed the top line of the assembler listing to
indicate it is written for 6502, not 65c02. If I had any bad
addressing modes or opcodes, it would have told me. But, you know me
too well, Michael! :-) Generally, I do target the enhanced //e
because it's what I grew up with. But the aim of this project is to
load old games that pre-date the //e, so 65c02-only would be kinda
unfair and myopic.
Unless, of course, there are buggy indirect addressing modes I'm using
that only show their ugly faces on 6502 and not 65c02. But that
wouldn't result in garbage data, just data going to the wrong place on
screen. :-)
A couple of things come to mind:
-Does the SSC like running in slot 3? I don't suppose this sort of
thing really matters on a ][, since it doesn't have any conflicting
slot 3 firmware, right?
If you depend on "PR#s" at any point, that won't work for a card
in slot 3.
If you directly access the card's resources through /DEVSEL space
($C0sx) without using the slot's /IOSEL ($Csxx) space, then it
should work fine.
-Is 115.2kbaud really stable? It seems so with my USB dongle, PC, and
the //e and //c I've tested on. There are a lot of happy ADT users
that use it. But are there cases where it doesn't work? Is it more
sensitive to cable length than slower communication modes?
At 6 feet (2 meters) cable length shouldn't be an issue. Beyond
25 feet, it might depend on the cable.
-Do I have some hair-brained bug in the recently changed code? Well,
I'll find out this weekend once I'm at home in front of my //s again.
In the meantime, I know what I can change to make it easier to support
older ][s. I need to make a global flag to indicate if lowercase is
permitted. The routines that send text should respect this flag.
>
-Is it necessary to have a quality-check utility (separate program) to
verify the port, speed and slot settings? This might be a useful
diagnostic for some. An auto-detect script of sorts was also discussed
before, and maybe this is the sort of thing that would make this flavor
of communication software more robust in the long term. This is
something that I think the ADT camp might write before me. ;-)
Since establishing reliable 2-way communication seems to always be
the hangup with connecting machines, some communication diagnostic
seems like a good idea.
The real problem is that most failures result in hangs, not useful
diagnostic messages, but that's a pervasive problem.
-michael
NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."