TF536 on the ST

[agranlund]

Thanks, I never used C either, some other guys may have :shrug:
Think your up to 060 speeds there ! :lol: BTW - you can just press "A" for all tests, @terriblefire Uses the menu as well, to much effort :lol:

Haha I never realised that! Just now accidentally found that you can apparently run individual tests by just clicking on them as well :lol:

This should maybe be its own thread.. sorry about the hijacking.
No matter the language used, it's going to be very important to exit the program with Ptermres() else the memory you allocated for the FRB is returned to the free pool when the program exits and that would be VeryBad(tm)
You'd get "random" crashes when that memory is given to some other application and TOS does disk access trashing that memory...

[exxos]

Haha I never realised that! Just now accidentally found that you can apparently run individual tests by just clicking on them as well :lol:

:roll: :chairsmack:

This should maybe be its own thread.. sorry about the hijacking.
No matter the language used, it's going to be very important to exit the program with Ptermres() else the memory you allocated for the FRB is returned

Good to know thanks. I dont think the thread has drifted, my stuff and TF's stuff both need alt-ram software to work.

[terriblefire]

This should maybe be its own thread.. sorry about the hijacking.
No matter the language used, it's going to be very important to exit the program with Ptermres() else the memory you allocated for the FRB is returned

Yes i wondered about this. What I dont like about this monster program is that this frb array is allocated as a static variable inside a function. Its not exactly obvious that this memory needs to not get cleaned up.

[agranlund]

@terriblefire , watching a replay of your stream and not sure if it comes up later but EmuTOS will disable and not allow you to enable the blitter in the presence of alt-ram. Any application that asks it will be told there is no blitter installed. I assume this is to protect against blitting to/from fastram.

Blitfix operates a bit different in EmuTOS compared to Atari TOs:

EmuTOS: blitfix.prg allows programs that asks about the blitter to actually see that that blitter is there (Ie: it prevents EmuTOS from lying about it)
As long as that application is running in STRAM - this allows you to run blitter enabled games or demos from EmuTOS, even if your machine has fastram, which you wouldn't be able to do without running blitfix.prg.
Edit: The blitter option is still going to be disabled in the menu here. It's mainly so you can run stuff like the blitter enabled Hard'n'heavy, Giana sisters, blitter demos and so on.

In TOS206, Blitfix.prg will allow TOS itself and GEM programs to use the blitter even when fastram is available. It patches TOS system calls to make them safe (will use HW blitter when safe, and SW blits when fastram is involved)
There is no easy way to do the same with EmuTOS from the outside but the source is available and it's quite easy to add similar code in a local custom build.


TOS2.06 will happily use the fastram as long as you have maprom.prg in your auto folder. just put maprom there before blitfix because they have to run in that order :)

I'm not sure, but I don't think any GameX game can run from fastram, there's a version out there that is just a FRONTIER.PRG without any of that GameX stuff and this one runs fine for me from fastram.

[terriblefire]

I'm not sure, but I don't think any GameX game can run from fastram, there's a version out there that is just a FRONTIER.PRG without any of that GameX stuff and this one runs fine for me from fastram.

OK thats useful. The speed difference with the ROM mapped to fast ram ins unbelievable. Really its the best way to go. Needs an MMU though.

Can you let me have a copy of that frontier.prg and i'll try it out tomorrow.

@PhilC how did you get on with the new firmware. Did you have keyboard issues like me?

[agranlund]

OK thats useful. The speed difference with the ROM mapped to fast ram ins unbelievable. Really its the best way to go. Needs an MMU though.
Can you let me have a copy of that frontier.prg and i'll try it out tomorrow.

Yeah, as much as humanly possible in fastram is absolutely the way to go :D
Sent you a PM about frontier.

[agranlund]

Good to know thanks. I dont think the thread has drifted, my stuff and TF's stuff both need alt-ram software to work.

That's true!
I'd just use maprom for the TF stuff though, it does the necessary alt-ram stuff + frb for Atari TOS in addition to speeding the system up by putting the rom in fastram.

A generic app that only does the alt-ram + frb part would be quite useful for non TF boards though.

[agranlund]

Think your up to 060 speeds there ! :lol:

It's mainly NVDI making it go to crazy town :)

GEM is still quite fast even without it though, with TOS2.06 being much faster than stock EmuTOS releases due to it being able to use the blitter with the help of blitfix.

Modified EmuTOS can be made faster, but that's really not very interesting since no one is going to want to apply source patches and recompile + burn EmuTOS themselves.

This is how it looks without NVDI:

TOS2.06 + maprom + blitfix

xtos206.png

EmuTOS 0.9.11 + maprom + blitfix
(blitfix does not help with the speed here but it's in my auto folder so it got loaded)

xemutos.png

[exxos]

EmuTOS 0.9.11 + maprom + blitfix
(blitfix does not help with the speed here but it's in my auto folder so it got loaded)
xemutos.png

We need a new 32bit blitter ;)

[agranlund]

We need a new 32bit blitter ;)

One million thumbs up on that! :D