- well...there goes my afternoon.... :-)
- I'm aware, but that's even more of an indictment of Win3.x
- In the AI lense of today, _A Mind Forever Voyaging_ is a really interesting game. I can share the frustration of having an author not finish anything. My fear is that George R.R. Martin will die before completing A Song of Ice and Fire.
- Maybe too strong a word. More an admission that I could do better when I am excited to post something so cool.
Thanks for all the work on this site. I can't image my "third place" if I didnt hang out here...
- Wow. That’s a cool share. Definitely a John Byrne or Sal Buscema marvel vibe from the 80s
- Certainly wasn't there to shame you or anyone! Yes, my plan is to open up tagging to people who've been here for a while (such as yourself!).
- Thanks for the detailed explanation. If that's what it is doing then it would indeed be interesting and pretty unusual for a modern day homebrew system. I too wondered if maybe the dither pattern referred to something like the Apple II's artifact colors but dismissed it because artifact colors require composite video output to work and there was no explicit mention of composite.
- Everyone knows about Captain Zilog, right?
- We have a small expansion on that bit of detail:
>The GPU also supports a text mode where the bytes of video memory alternate between a color byte and a code point representing a text character. The color byte is used with the second video DAC to represent two 8 color values for foreground and background. The text mode can also support a high res graphics mode with two pixels per byte of video memory.
That explains a bit more. 2 pixels per byte and then here comes 416! That number is odd, meaning they have done some thing unique, IMHO.
So we get 4 bits per pixel. 8 colors uses up three of them, so that last bit must combine pixel data in some novel way.
4 dither patterns goes into 8 colors nicely, 2 colors per pattern.
It could mean each pixel can be one of 8 colors with no constraints.
Or, each pair of pixels is assigned a color, which would come from the 8 already defined. And maybe the order is toggled in some regular way.
Oh, wait! Maybe he did what Woz did on the Apple 2!
Looks like this:One byte has a data form like this: DD_CCC_CCC CCC = colors 0 through 7 for the even and odd pixel DD = dither patterns 0 through 3 which make use of the scanline counter and pixel order in the byte 00 = pixels are assigned colors as given by their respective CCC fields. 01 = pixel color order swapped on odd lines 10 = pixel color order swapped on odd lines 11= both!
...where the two zeroes are bits and the CCC fields are for the odd and even pixel in that byte.DD = 00 Pixels go by color at all times 0123456701234567 line 0 0123456701234567 line 1 A line looks like this: 00_CCC_CCC 00_CCC_CCC 00_CCC_CCC 00_CCC_CCC 00_CCC_CCC 00_CCC_CCC 00_CCC_CCC 00_CCC_CCCFor brevity and clarity I am just going to write pixel color numbers 0 through 7 rather than all those bits.
And I am on Mobile, so I will also ditch delimiters. I think it remains clear enough. Hope so!00 01_23_45_67_01_23_45_67
Ok, here we go!00 0123456701234567
Frankly, if this is what they did, It is very expressive. I would get a lot out of a mode like this. Dithers can be pretty expensive either to compute dynamically, or in terms of stored images.DD = 01 -- Horizontal Dither Odd 0123456701234567 line 0 1032547610325476 line 1 . . . DD = 10 -- horizontal dither even 1032547610325476 line 0 0123456701234567 line 1 . . . DD = 11 Both odd and even dither! 1032547610325476 line 0 1032547610325476 line 1 . . . Using just black and white pixels: 00 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 01 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃 10 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃 🟈0🟃0🟈0🟃0 11 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃 0🟃0🟈0🟃0🟃These patterns can be applied on a byte basis! It is close to the next best thing if we can't have 16 colors.
What I meant by "he did what Woz did" was put those high bits to good use. On the Apple, Woz shifted pixels a bit to deliver a 6 color high resolution graphics screen. I am sure you all have seen how expressive Apple artifact graphics can be.
It is way more than what one can do on a 4 color screen, particularly given the pixels get fatter. One trades a lot of detail.
Now, this scheme has those same attributes! Resolution potential remains high, just like the Apple high resolution screen. Nice, small pixels.
But now the number of apparent screen colors goes way up! Those pattern variations will yield tons of fairly automated, consistent color impressions.
Instead of a 8 color screen, or a 16 color one, it is as if more like 24 or even maybe 32 colors are available.
This is all a big guess of course. But it is a somewhat informed one that takes TTL possibilities into account as I understand them.
BTW, if this ran at TV NTSC frequencies, and offered 320 pixels per line, or offered some combination of pixels that repeats evenly into the NTSC color cycles, given that odd number of pixels, it would be gorgeous! Just saying.
- In 1985 Windows 3.x was still far in the future. The closest thing to ST/Amiga in the PC world was GEM - until Apple sued DRI and made them cripple it.
- A hack seems an appropriate term, I could go with that. There's even precedent for that in how people got Mac OS working on the hardware that was not the official Mac and called it the Hackintosh.
- speaking of tags, today I found the stories with no tags link : https://twostopbits.com/notags
What is this supposed to do ? Beyond shaming me for submitting some stories without tags that I have since fixed?
will this be something the community can fill in eventually ?
asking for a friend.
- What do you call it ? a hack ? a bastardization?
- My grandparents bought an atari 2600 one summer when I went to stay with them in Quebec City. They bought the defender and berzerk games and I was fascinated by the folio sized comics. Unfortunately, at the summers end I returned back to ontario and they sold the games and console to make the experience a "rental".
I had no idea that a larger set of comics was later released independent of the cartgridges.
- Thanks! I would like to do more with it, but I think I may want to start looking at doing my own cart (with more RAM, and maybe SD) first.
- Its not 'retro', but I find this to be a very soothing font on my amber ("hazeltine palette") scheme:
- There were other "-comm" programs back in the day, I remember using TeleComm and zComm, and other things, in independent Quarterdeck desqView windows .. there was a period in the late 80's/early 90's where the modem 'terminal/comm' program selection was later reflective in the mid-90's "browser wars" .. I went through a few different 'comm' programs before settling finally on minicom because: linux.
But I'm sure, on one of those floppies in the vast collection on the shelf, there are at least 12 different MSDOS "comm" programs that I tried out, for a while ..
- my psion 3a was better than win3.x :-)
i could have spreadsheet, database, agenda and word processor open and swapping between docs instantly while my win3.x desktop lurched and trashed disk with just 1-2 windows open. also win3.x at the best of times was pretty crashy. a few reboots a day was quite common.
plus memory. some programs wanted expanded, some wanted extended so you ended up with multiple boot configurations, some for games, some for windows, some for dos apps.
- To the teenage me, the Amiga 1000 looked gorgeous, but was an impossible dream due to its entry price. The Atari ST520 was affordable and still looked very nice.
- From what I understand from his write-up, he's replaced several components with their counterparts from ReactOS (specifically the bootloader and the fallback video driver). Without access to the source code of the original OS and by using components from another, I'd call this an adaptation, rather than a true port. Your definition may differ, of course - and just for fun, I asked ChatGPT and it disagrees with me too 😂
The part I would call a true port is how he changed the ReactOS bootloader to work with the AppleTV - looking through the commit history on that is fascinating, I can recommend it if you haven't done so. Check it out at https://github.com/DistroHopper39B/reactos/commits/AppleTV-D...
To be honest, I'm actually more impressed by how he got XP to work almost entirely unmodified than if he had done what I would consider a true port of the full OS.
- The beginning of MIDI workstations; remembering Lengeling's and Steinberg's first programs; these were great times for musicians.
- It looks cool but I was confused by this line:
> "Bitmapped Graphics: - Hi-res mode up to 416x240 with 8 colors and 4 dithering patterns"
I'm familiar with dithering as a multi-pixel pattern usually done by software to create the appearance of shades in between the colors that individual pixels can display - at the cost of spatial resolution (because it requires multiple pixels for the pattern). So I was thrown by what "dithering patterns" might mean in the context of a line discussing hardware specs like individual pixel resolutions and colors. My guess would be maybe some kind of hardware mode that addresses more than single pixels but that sounds like tiles. Does anyone know?
- I disagree. Custom HAL and bootloader were made. The rest of the OS was changed. This is a port IMHO
- I had an ST very briefly. It was reliable - but when I found out that thr Amiga was the real successor to my beloved Atari 800 - I put my ST up for sale and ordered the Amiga.
I don’t understand about windows. Windows 3 was still 3 years away in 1988 And the first decent windows. Win 3.1 was 7 years away.
I think Mcirosoft was still hoping Macintosh was going to be everywhere in 1985 when st and Amiga came out.
- Yeah, I tried to use Windows prior to 3.1 a few different times and never made it past the first five minutes. While Windows 3.1 was significantly better, I still bailed out after an hour. By the early 90s I just wasn't willing to slip that far backward compared to the more mature, complete and useful options I was familiar with. It wasn't until Windows 95 and the Pentium that I could adopt the PC as one of my main daily drivers.
- I too was an Amiga fan, moving from an 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer to the Amiga 1000 in late 85. The price of the Amiga was significantly beyond my early 20s budget so I was only able to finagle one by finding someone who needed some software written on the Amiga and getting them to buy me one in exchange for writing what they needed. But such was the siren song appeal of Amiga's promise in mid-85. I spent months poring over every page, image and word in the "Launch" issue of AmigaWorld Magazine, which was in reality a cleverly disguised extended sales brochure that came out months before the computer itself was available for retail purchase.
No teenager ever inhaled every inch of a Penthouse magazine in the detail I memorized that issue of AmigaWorld. It was truly computer porn in every sense, an airbrushed fantasy which significantly surpassed the reality of the computer that actually shipped for at least its first year on the market. There wasn't much you could do with a $2000 Amiga 1000 system in the first months other than run Boing, RoboCity and other demos ($2000 including the "optional" chip RAM upgrade (which was in reality required), RGB monitor and external 2nd floppy drive).
The early launch applications like Graphicraft and Musicraft weren't quite complete enough to be useful for much real production work, largely because when the Amiga 1000 first shipped the paint was still quite wet on the operating system itself. Worse, Addison Wesley the publisher of the official developer docs for the Amiga took their sweet time actually printing and shipping the damn books, despite the fact it was only a re-layout of the docs Amiga supplied in Xeroxed form to early developers. Unable to wait any longer as my Amiga-purchasing benefactor needed their software, I drove three hours away late at night to the house of a developer who had the original Amiga docs and took them to an all-night Kinko's and spent the hours between midnight and dawn copying every page by hand (at night because the developer needed the docs by day because he was late on his own application for his employer). But... strangely, we loved the early Amiga 1000 anyway. We thought we were buying a Penthouse Pet but what showed up was an infant that did little other than cry all night and need its diapers changed :-). Thankfully, a year or so later the OS had matured enough and sort-of real tooling, apps, docs and source code examples (in the form of Fish Disks) started appearing enough that the Amiga's fantasy potential slowly started to become real.
Dave's right that most Amiga-centric people from back in the day may still simply be incapable of assessing the Atari ST in a completely fair and balanced way. That's probably because we didn't assess the early Amiga in a fair and balanced way either (but in the other direction). So, he did a great job setting aside his own ingrained worldview to put the ST in it's rightfully deserved historical place.
The ST really was a hell of a deal, and in all honesty, I could never have afforded an Amiga 1000 if I'd actually had to pay cash for it instead of labor. While the early ST certainly didn't deliver on its own promise either (due to its own serious teething pains), it did hold the promise of being the super cute, fun girl next door who could become your best friend and, if you were lucky, actually marry. It paled only when compared to the Penthouse Pet-fantasy promise of the Amiga, which the early Amiga certainly didn't live up to (and by a much larger margin than the ST), but which, somehow... eventually, the Amiga mostly managed to do - although largely in the form of the later A500 and A2000.
- > That’s because in some ways, the ST and Amiga were better than a PC running Windows 3.x. If you didn’t experience it, that statement sounds absurd. But if you experienced it, you totally know what I mean
Do people really find that absurd? I was a Mac user, but I've never seen anyone seriously argue a PC with Win 3.x was better than Amiga or the ST. It was ubiquitous, but it was both less pleasant to use and uglier than practically any contemporary non-x86 option. It's not like Microsoft wasn't trying, of course; Windows had to run on commodity PC hardware designed to run DOS, which meant a wide variety of potential hardware had to be supported or supportable; the Mac, the ST and the Amiga each had a single hardware vendor.
- I wouldn't really call this a port, but it is definitely some impressive work in getting it to run on a platform this different from the target hardware.
- "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
What a cool project if you want to build from the bottom up. Lately, I have been doing more with pi emulating the mainframe and minicomputers - but if I was retired this might be something to do for fun.
---
FTA : Novasaur TTL Retrocomputer
* Dual Processor CPU/GPU (Harvard Architecture)
* 33 MHz dot clock, 16.5 MHz data path, 8.25 MHz per processor (~3.5 CPU MIPs)
* 256k ROM: 96k ALU, 64k native program, 64k cold storage, 32k fonts
* 512k RAM: 7 banks of 64k user, 60k display, 4k system
* 76 ALU functions including multiply/divide, system, and math functions
* Bitmapped Graphics: - Hi-res mode up to 416x240 with 8 colors and 4 dithering patterns - Lo-res mode up to 208x160 with 256 colors, double buffered
* Text Mode: - 8 colors FG/BG, 256 line buffer - Up to 104x60 using 8x8 glyphs - 80x36 and 64x48 rows using 8x16 glyphs
* Audio: 4 voice wavetable synthesis, ADSR, 8-bit DAC, 8Hz–4.8kHz
* PS2 Keyboard: Native interface built in
* RS232 Serial Port: Full duplex, RTS/CTS flow control, 9600 baud
* Expansion Port: 7 addressable 8-bit register ports, 4 interrupt flags
* Chip Count: 34 TTL (22 CPU, 12 GPU), 1 ROM, 1 RAM, 1 PAL, 4 analog
* Gate Count: 1,425 (935 CPU, 490 GPU)
* PCB size: 8" x 5" (200 x 125mm) double-sided board
* Power: 6v @ 1.6A (10W)
- More
It was nice to see it in the box, so to speak.