To be honest, I houugh Acorn Electron has the same processor as C64
and Atari XL, and I was sure, they hawe no Ports and anything is
memory-mapped (By the way, I currently extending my Retro-X to Acorn
Electron and Amiga screen conversion, is your Electron Emulator
probably for SAM???).
Everything is memory mapped, but it's still registers at addresses,
you just use the regular load/store instructions to write to them. The
only difference of the z80 versus the 6502 is that it has a 17-bit
address, adding a second 64kb can only be accessed by a IN/OUT.
My Electron emulator is for the PC/Mac, but I haven't released a new
version in years. In any case, if you have any questions about
anything on that front, feel free to drop me a line.
Releasing your 3D engine for others is a great idea, I saw the
Videos on YouTube, I think, you can improve the speed of line
drawing by optionaly draw every second pixel of the line on screen
(like "Mercenary" on Speccy).
That would definitely help. There's quite a few more things I can do
to speed it up without affecting the graphics first though. It's just
finding the time. I think I'm relatively lucky because I don't work in
anything to do with software so I don't end up with programming
fatigue from my real life.
I'm also giving serious consideration to knocking up a quick BASIC
dialect to try to increase the code's reach to non-ASM people and
make it more likely that some actual titles will be released. But
if I manage that then it'll be through a PC/Mac-side compiler
rather than any sort of Sam-based interactive environment.
Excellent idea (that is something I was planing for Retro-X, but as
Cross-Suite, with supply for multiple Machines, with modern BASIC
dialect and comfortable Scintilla-Based editor. Unfortunally I was
never very good at coding in Z80 assembly, and using ROM Routines),
I'm looking forward to see your work, as you are much more gifted
coder than I'm.
Oh, this stuff is all much easier now than it must have been in the
80s. And it's not just the wide array of information that is
accessible through the internet, when I was learning 3d I found out
that Elite achieves its near-solid look just by using convex objects
by directly asking David Braben. Let's not pretend you would have been
able to get that sort of help when that sort of information actually
had commercial value.
