Oric + LOCI + PT3

[6502Nerd]

Hello and happy new year Oric friends!

I have made a new video to show my Oric-1 with LOCI running dflat which now has software to decode PT3 song files. I got the decoder after becoming aware of it here and fixed a small bug which stopped the keyboard working.

The video shows songs played as part of a 20ms (50Hz) interrupt with dflat still working normally. I do a rough benchmark of a for-next loop to 5000 and fine that;
- With tracker running loop takes about 4.7s
- Without tracker loop takes about 3.8s

So just under 25% slower with tracker running - but it's not too noticeable as you will see when showing the listing and doing some graphics!

[Dbug]

Very nice

These tunes are quite good, just need to make a mario game now

[Chema]

This is getting really impressive.

[Sodiumlightbaby]

I know games etc do this often, but there's just something about seeing a "multi-tasking" 8-bit OS environment that makes me very very happy. Well done!

[iss]

Hello and happy new year Oric friends!

Happy New Year, @6502Nerd!

Cool video!
Here is the answer about PT3/AKY (Arkos Tracker):
Download VortexTracker (VT):
https://github.com/ivanpirog/vortextracker/releases
or
https://github.com/z00m128/vortextracker25/releases
I'm not sure which is more "original" but both work.
(I tried to compile VT to Linux with Lazarus but failed, so I'm using it with wine).
Use VT to open PT3 and "Save as ... " to VT2, Use ArkosTracker to open the VT2 file .

It would be very interesting to compare size/performance PT3 vs AKU vs MYM players.
Pls, attach Mario.PT3 here and will make the samples asap .

[6502Nerd]

Happy New Year, @6502Nerd!

Same to you dear raxiss - and all Oricians!

Thanks everyone for the kind comments - I also do like this feel of 'multitasking' with full soundtrack in the background!

I tried to upload smario.pt3 but was not allowed?

Anyway here is the GitHub link for Mario and some others : https://github.com/6502Nerd/dflat/tree/ ... /pt3/tunes

[xahmol]

I know games etc do this often, but there's just something about seeing a "multi-tasking" 8-bit OS environment that makes me very very happy. Well done!

Well, I know that on the Commodore 128 people are actually working on true multi threading 8 bit OSses…. Completely of topic here, so won’t explain further (but DM me if you want to have more details). Obviously the C128 has a lot more resources to do so, such as more memory (128 KB RAM and 64 KB Video RAM), but also quite a sophisticated Memory Management Unit chip that can amongst others actually relocate the zero page so every thread can have its own independent zero page.

But again, way too off-topic.
And 6502nerd, nice!

[ibisum]

Wasn't ContikiOS capable of doing mult-tasking on 6502 at some point?

/offtopic

[6502Nerd]

Here is the answer about PT3/AKY (Arkos Tracker):
Use VT to open PT3 and "Save as ... " to VT2, Use ArkosTracker to open the VT2 file .

It would be very interesting to compare size/performance PT3 vs AKU vs MYM players.
Pls, attach Mario.PT3 here and will make the samples asap .

Ok I did a bit of digging on this. So it turns out actually I can save a pt3 file as txt and then use songtoaky took to convert to aky. This is very good news to automate the conversion from txt to aky through scripting.

(BTW I tried converting to VT2 and found for the song I tried - Ghosts n Goblins - it does not sound correct)

Some investigation on sizes of pt3 vs aky
SMario
- pt3 : 1.43KB
- aky : 3.42KB
- aky is 1.99KB bigger

Oxygene4
- pt3 : 5.16KB
- aky : 9.36KB
- aky is 4.2KB bigger

From this small try, pt3 is almost half the size of aky.

However the pt3 player is about 4.4KB. I haven't tried the aky player - I understand it is less than 2KB (1800 bytes)?

My rough benchmark experiment using dflat seems to show the pt3 player slows other processing by about 25%. Do we know how the aky player compares?

So I guess depends on the use case. For me, unless the aky player does not slow other processing down as much as the pt3 player (e.g. say only 10-15%) then I might switch to aky. However, given the bigger aky song size, I am still minded to stay with pt3 player.

Interested to hear any other thoughts and experiments!

[6502Nerd]

Wasn't ContikiOS capable of doing mult-tasking on 6502 at some point?

/offtopic

That rings a bell for me but not looked at it for a long time..

Andre Fachat is a homebrew computer maker and has made a multi-tasking OS for 6502. I haven't tried it but it looks very good, and it can work on Oric if it can work on a CBM PET!

http://www.6502.org/users/andre/osa/index.html

/offtopic

[xahmol]

Andre Fachat is a homebrew computer maker and has made a multi-tasking OS for 6502. I haven't tried it but it looks very good, and it can work on Oric if it can work on a CBM PET!

Well, if topic starter also goes along off topic
Yeah, GeckOS was one of the two OSses I hinted at.

http://www.6502.org/users/andre/osa/index.html

The other one is OS128 by Bart van Leeuwen, but that is far from ready yet, but imho even much more impressive as it takes full advantage of the C128, while GeckOS sacrifices a lot of the C128 potential by being portable.
First peek at OS128 can be seen here:



But GeckOS should indeed be portable to Oric.

And sorry for taking this thread very much off topic, maybe we should split the OS discussion of from the main thread.