MICROMAN

[stefano]

New version for the Memotech HRG
To stay in 16K and keep an acceptable speed it limits the display to 64 rows.
The interrupt handler is quite experimental, I'm not sure the frame rate is the right one for the TV sets... can anybody test it on the real hardware ?

[Moggy]

Tried this on eighty one just crashes.

Don't have my ZXpands at the moment when I get them back will try on real hardware.

[stefano]

Does ZXpand support the Memotech HRG ?
I thought it was working in WRX mode.

The older EightyOne V0.42 works.

[stefano]

Memotech and G007 HRG boards !
2 version are provided per hardware type (compact and "big").
Big versions yet are not so big and quite slow, though.

[stefano]

I forgot to say that the MT version worked at least once:

[PokeMon]

The Memotech WRX mode has been tested on the real hardware (see here: http://www.z88dk.org/wiki/doku.php?id=l ... _functions), but it is a bit glitchy.. and I never found the reason for it.
EightyOne looks even slower in MTHRG mode than it ARX mode, it could be due to my libs, though.

Well, here's an almost playable version, even if still a bit slow.

I just test some HRG programs with my new ZX80CORE, released next year.
The above version doesn't work at all or better has a very weird display timing.
Even in EightyOne it doesn't work (flickering only).

The other versions posted (WRX) do work.
What is the difference betweek WRX and Memotech ?
Why are so many versions, this is really confusing.

From view of the user I am missing explanations for the game.
This could be done easy with displaying a short text screen before loading the game and list what hardware options are supported or needed.
I am wondering why software developers never did it or not do it nowadays - even when they know about dependencies (more than the plain user).

So just my thoughts about ... when it is not a 1k version why not spending a few hundred bytes text information ?

[stefano]

I notice after long time that I never answered, it is clearly necessary a bit of explanation.
The "microman" game is a demonstration program I wrote in C for the z88dk.
The game comes with few preset options, intended to slightly adjust it to the different display and memory capabilities but the resulting program is far bigger than an assembly written game.
Similarly to the G007 the Memotech WRX graphics requires an hardware adapter not compatible to the WRX mode (EightyOne emulates them al but the specific graphics mode must be configured). The z88dk at the moment provides only one graphics mode at a time (on the ZX81), so I'm providing a compiled file per mode.. to shrink "microman" in 16K was challenging (it still is, now z88dk is able to build the same program in slightly less memory space but few extra functions are probably added by default and must be excluded), one of the "features" being carved out is the startup menu with the controller choices.
It is obviously possible to provide even more variations, the 64 row drivers leave more space to the CPU, using more memory could permit more options, etc.. In my opinion it is nice to finally have complex programs running on those "obscure" graphics extensions

[stefano]

.. by the way I'm not able to run the last versions I posted for the Memotech. I recently claimed about problems with some EightyOne version not correctly behaving, but now I'm even more confused because some program just runs everywhere

What I can do is to post a recent build of Microman for the Memotech graphics card, smaller than the initial one (working and tested, still available at the beginning of this thread), slightly faster with the controller options at startup.
32K RAM is still necessary,


EDIT:
I finaly could run almost everything, but the older files require an ancient EightyOne version 0.42 with Memotech HRG configured, the NTSC and M1NOT flags disabled.

[stefano]

I recently figured out an interesting technique to do hand optimization on the intermediate ASM files generated by z88dk.
It implies a temporary personalization of the optimization rules and a set of subroutines written in ASM and incorporated inside the C source of the game.

The results, together with the latest optimizations, permitted me to generate valid (very slow) versions of the game fitting in the standard 16K.
They are for the WRX mode, to play use keys Q.A.O.P

microman-full-smaller-wrx.P

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microman-full-wrx.P

(8.97 KiB) Downloaded 315 times