Nice Hires screens

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Symoon
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Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

Hi all,
I'm going to an Atari meeting in France next Saturday: AC 2017 - for those interested, you can still subscribe until tomorrow evening. http://www.yaronet.com/topics/187724-ac ... communique
A few Oricians should be there.

I'll probably bring an Atmos there. I plan to demo my fast loading tapes routines (if I don't forget them this time :roll: ), so I think I'll set up an "audio" slideshow, i.e. a WAV file with hires screens that will loop, and be loaded thru the tape port.

So far I have a few hires screens (including an Atari ST desktop ;) ), I know there are some on CEO Mag disks, but if you guys want to be part of the slideshow, please send me your pictures in .TAP format this weekend ;)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Dbug »

You can use some of the slideshow demo if you want I guess:
http://miniserve.defence-force.org/svn/ ... lope/data/
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

Thanks, converting the screens back with the -f1 option seems to work like a charm :)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

I think there's a small bug though. It seems Pictconv produces a header going from A000 to BF40 for a Hires screen, which is 1 byte too much (should stop at BF3F). This prevented the next screen to load with my fast routines, as it used the 1st data bytes to complete the previous loading I guess.
Apart from this, the slideshow from tape runs fast and fine :)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Dbug »

I guess that's the usual +1/-1 on the computation of the end address which has been plaging all our tape related tools for a long time:

Code: Select all

void OricPictureConverter::save_header(long handle,int adress_begin)
{
  unsigned char Header[]=
  {
    // 0
    0x16,0x16,0x16,
    // 3
    0x24,
    // 4
    0x00,0x00,
    // 6
    0x80,0x00,
    // 8
    0xbf,0xdf,
    // 10
    0xa0,0x00,
    // 12
    0x00
  };

  int adress_end=adress_begin+m_Buffer.m_buffer_size;
  Header[ 8]=(unsigned char)((adress_end>>8)&255);
  Header[ 9]=(unsigned char)( adress_end&255);
  Header[10]=(unsigned char)((adress_begin>>8)&255);
  Header[11]=(unsigned char)( adress_begin&255);
  write(handle,Header,13);
}
Should probably replace the line by:

Code: Select all

  int adress_end=adress_begin+m_Buffer.m_buffer_size-1;
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Dbug »

Could you try this version?
PictConv_0_25.zip
Fixed the off-by-one error in the tape header when Exporting Oric images to tape format
(1014.02 KiB) Downloaded 343 times
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

Thanks for the fast reply!
I manually corrected the addresses but will give a try indeed, and let you know.
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

Well it seems to work fine this time, thanks again :)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Dbug »

Good, will be in the next release of the OSDK :)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Dbug »

Impressively fast compared to standard tape routines :)

Could probably use that to make an Oric version of Bad Apple, streaming the frames from the tape :)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

Thanks ! I don't know Bad Apple, do you have a link?
The slideshow has a very small pause between each screen (something like half a second), and of course could be faster if only half a screen is loaded for instance. The problem is that according to the compression, the framerate could not be constant.

I'm currently working at having a better reliability for a majority of Atmos. I'm optimistic but I won't be able to achieve a 100% goal, some machines won't handle it. Also, the sound volume is quite sensitive - as one could expect. Too low or too high, and errors occur.
After that I'll have to think how the loader could be implmented for a more universal use (actually just located in #400...).

Meanwhile I also have produced an new coding which goes 20-30% faster. For instance the boat that loads in 3.2 seconds would load, IIRC, in 2.4 seconds. But I still have to write the decoding routine, which will have strong timing contraints, and I'm not sure it's possible yet. I'd need a month off for this ;)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Dbug »

http://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=ba ... &type=prod

Basically it's originally an anime video made by fans, but it has been converted to a number of computers using various forms of compressions and encoding. The most promising one was actually using tapes to "stream" the video.

Assuming the code can be timed perfectly, it should be possible to read a bit of data, decode and display it, read some more, rince and repeat.
Maybe it would even be possible to encode the music as a stream of compressed YM registers along the video :)
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Dbug »

Btw, I added your bug report to the PictConv documentation page (at the end):
http://osdk.org/index.php?page=document ... e=pictconv

From now on, I'm going to try to get one issue registered for each bug I work on, so it will make it easier to know what was fixed, when, in which version of the SDK.
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Re: Nice Hires screens

Post by Symoon »

About Bad Apple, being in black and white only would allow us to store only 6 bits instead of 8. Removing the RLE compression would allow a constant framerate.
But having enough speed for several frames per second seems impossible to me.

Loading something compressed then uncompressing it seems impossible to me too, the problem with fast loading is that almost every cycle is used. Adding another decompression would mean having to add stop bits to have more time, thus a longer loading time.
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