sam-users  

Re: Short, short questions

Andrew Collier
Wed, 21 May 2008 09:10:13 -0700

Hi,

Well - at least, any of the things you can ever change, yes! screen on/off, 
border colour, palette, screen mode, ram page, etc.

Early versions of SimCoupe didn't support these changes better than once per 
line. I remember Allan (or was it Simon?) telling me he had never realised 
that the E-Tunes player from Fred 63 and on, even had a scrolly message - 
because at the time, SimCoupe wasn't able to display it.

> Also, one further question: am I right to think that the Sam has no
> means of producing interlaced video?

Correct. Always non-interlaced (despite various examples on Fred of flickery 
pictures which purported otherwise).

Andrew


On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 04:36:34PM +0100, Thomas Harte wrote:
> Literally anything? On many of the machines I have written emulators
> for, most things are usually completely changeable but some things are
> loaded internally — especially on any machine that has a variable
> screen start address.
> 
> Also, one further question: am I right to think that the Sam has no
> means of producing interlaced video?
> 
> On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Andrew Collier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 03:16:07PM +0100, Thomas Harte wrote:
> >> If you interrupt routine is small, could you not also just switch off
> >> the first one or two scanlines of your display, and even grab a few
> >> extra cycles out as a result? Or can you not enable and disable the
> >> display per scanline?
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > You could, yes. You can alter pretty much anything about the screen on a
> > line-by-line basis - and if you're very careful, during those lines in the
> > screen area itself! For example, MMENOdemo 1 part 2 (on Fred 60) changes the
> > screen page during the raster; repeatedly switching between foreground and
> > background screens to draw lit and unlit rectabgles - which togehter form a
> > scrolling message.
> >
> > Various other programs switch between mode 4 and mode 3, to get high
> > resolution in a certain area of the screen - Edwin Blink's menu on Blitz
> > (issue 6, was it?) and David Laundon's Fred menu come to mind.
> >
> > Anyway - in this particular case I wanted to display the whole screen; and 
> > in
> > the case of one or two scanlines, it probably takes longer to set up the 
> > line
> > interrupt handling, than you save by having the screen turned off.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Andrew
> >
> > --
> >  ---       Andrew Collier         ----
> >  ---- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ ---
> >                                      --
> > r<2+ T<4* cSEL dMS hEn/CB<BL A4 S+*<++ C$++L/mP W- a-- Vh+seT+ (Cantab) 
> > 1.1.4
> >

-- 
 ---       Andrew Collier         ----
  ---- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ ---
                                      --
r<2+ T<4* cSEL dMS hEn/CB<BL A4 S+*<++ C$++L/mP W- a-- Vh+seT+ (Cantab) 1.1.4