Gigatron Hackers

I can only hope that the community as a whole gets in better shape again and starts writing cool simple games using at67's gtBASIC. It has been very quiet on the front of user contributions during the past year, all the while the system had all the potential for dozens of original and fun retro game...

Sparked from some early v6502 experiments while recovering from surgery last year, this turned into a bigger development than anticipated. Unfortunately the details are now scattered over various threads in various forums. Oscar took the effort to pull it all together and turn it into one coherent a...

I expect both v4 and v5a Loaders clear the channelMask bits. It seems that ROM v5a just doesn't turn them back on in all cases when safe, while ROM v4 does. I'll see if I can fix it in dev.rom first. Please don't try to workaround it for ROM v5a, it's not worth it. Edit : a fix is now in dev.rom. It...

I'm still scratching my head about the different behaviour of Boing on ROM v5a. How many channels does it expect to be active, 1 or 4? It expects all 4 channels to be active, I'll get 5a into my ROM switcher and test it out on real hardware. I don't seem to have any Boing audio issues on 5a in the ...

But those apps can't disable the channels themselves before it's too late. So Loader does it for you: overwrite, and you get one channel but your data isn't corrupted. Don't overwrite, and you keep all four channels active.] Actually... You can do it from within code, (although it is pretty nasty a...

at67 wrote: ↑05 May 2020, 15:06Games like Frogger, Space Invaders, Pac Man, Missile Command, Scramble, Dig Dug, Moon Patrol etc, will be mostly trivial, (with a little creative thinking ).

Look what I found back from our 2017 project notebook. And then look again at the first three in your list...

I'm perplexed by what the demos achieve. The soundtracks are simply amazing. When we closed ROM v1 it was a gamble if the wave modulation instructions would ever become useful. But we had a cycle or two to spare during /hPulse and nothing advanced would fit, only wavA and wavX. Certainly no proper v...

Those following my GitHub activity may have noted this: Contributions.png No activity in recent weeks and some work yesterday to freeze a ROM version 5a. This all has to do with my declining health situation, some of you are aware of already. Health problems that started one year ago recently escala...

This is a fantastic development for the platform. It brings the Gigatron back to what it is good at: running retro video games. The Gigatron can be a great gaming machine with VCS 2600 and VIC-20 style games. However, Tiny BASIC is a bit too slow for games and nowadays not everyone wants to do assem...

Keep in mind that if you want to save into, and type back from, BabelFish, then use a recent version. By looking at the line ending it determines if you've saved from MS BASIC. If so, BabelFish slows down the type back speed so that MS BASIC can keep up while it's tokenising the lines. The 511 bytes...