Re: Wudsn now supports Apple //

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, August 26, 2012 10:16:00 AM UTC-5, a2retro wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 15, 2012 3:25:18 PM UTC-4, BLuRry wrote:
> 
>  First I need to get this darned RamFactor to work.  Stupid evil undocumented i/o registers...
> 
> > -B
> 
> 
> 
> Hi BLuRry, any specific reason you wanted Ramfactor emu vs Apple 1 MB memory expansion card?  ... which is documented.

Great question.  Yes, for totally selfish reasons: I have a RamFactor card in my real //e.  A RamWorks-style card would probably be easier to implement, but the slinky-style ram was particularly attractive because you can read the memory from start to finish without bank-switching.  The apple memory card is well-documented but I liked the partitioning support of the RamFactor, plus it can go up to 16 megs.

I spent quite long time on Apple Game Server, which is essentially a serial-based streaming protocol supporting compression and allows for both graphics output and hooks to call external commands via JSR or JMP.  For producing a demo, this translates quite nicely: I can test the demo over a serial port with the Apple Game Server code.  For a final production, all I have to do is change the serial reads to read bytes from the slinky ram.  So there would be a loader stage to populate the data into the ram card and then the playback part would just pull data back out and handle it accordingly.  My initial experiments show that some level of full motion video (lo-res or double lo-res) might be possible if the scene changes are low -- or double-hires if there is very little complexity

-B