Gigatron Hackers

Warning: incompatible changes in dev7rom I just made a bunch of changes in dev7rom that makes it incompatible with earlier versions. Given that there are only a handful of people using it, I believe this is manageable. Just in case, both the https://github.com/lb3361/gigatron-rom and https://github...

Somehow PhiBrizzo's program keeps me excited, maybe because I do not yet fully understand how it works. This is magic. Anyway, this prompted me to make drastic changes to an experimental version of dev7rom, with two new opcodes named FILL and BLIT that are optimized for pixel bandwidth and little el...

Runs at 5.26 fps with a few little changes.

Now is very faaast :) I ported it to dev7 (because of my own instrumentation) and it works very well. I measured 4.6 frames per second, which is better than what my code would achieve on a full frame. The idea to use 32x32 blocks with randomized phase is very neat. r_dev7.gt1 I think you won handso...

This is quite cool because it is compact. I wonder whether you can implement the video table in page 1. See also https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=343 for another solution, quite different in design. But it relies on an old CPLD on a daughter board, with about the same gate count as the whol...

In fact, extending the effect to 119x119 gives 6fps. Same source code, just different defines in tablegen.c. That's a bit above half the pixels on the screen. I cannot make it full screen because the program would become too big. However the speed would be about 3-4 fps, not far from Phibrizzo's eff...

Another variant of my rotator.
Using the dev7rom COPYN opcode, the size can be increased from 51x51 to 85x85 while keeping ten frames per second.
It runs on the online emulator.

I must use backward copy when coordination Y of souce area is smaller that destination. Then I believe you can go even faster. What matters is to maximize forward blitting on each row (because one can use the gigatron auto-incrementing store opcode). But even if always go forward in X, you can proc...

It's all about the bandwidth one can get! Using SYS calls (when possible) is just a way to read/write more pixels in the same time. But then you have to account for the setup time, that is, deciding and specifying which pixels to copy. There should be an opcode NCOPY in ROMvX0 that is slower than SY...

New release GLCC_RELEASE_2.5. Minor optimizations and a couple bug fixes. Linux and Mac users : clone the repository with $ git clone https://github.com/lb3361/gigatron-lcc.git $ cd gigaton-lcc $ make See https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?p=4204#p4204 to use glcc from the build directory (with...