ROMv6 is a snapshot of the many changes contributed to the DEVROM by members of the community since the release of ROMv5a. Since they get close to what Marcel had intended for ROMv5, it made sense to make a stable ROM release that can be used as a point of reference for both application programs and future ROM developments. Many thanks to the Gigatron community, not only for the code contributions, but also for the many ideas and the lively discussions that inspired them. Particular thanks to at67 for constructively scrutinizing every single patch and for overseeing the release process.
Here is an incomplete list of changes since ROMv5a:
Application changes
- "GTMine" (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=416) has replaced "Tetronis".
- "Mandelbrot" runs much faster (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=330).
- "Racer" has new sound effects (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=395).
- "Credits" has a new look.
- ROMv6 fully supports the RAM & IO expansion bus designed by Marcel and JWolfram (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=330), including the ability to boot the Gigatron from a FAT32 formatted SD card attached to the expansion SPI headers (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=332). The simplest way to experiment with such an expansion board is to build Hans61's dualdrive board (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?p=3694#p3694) which only requires simple chips (74HCT) and a ram (e.g. AS6C1008).
- New SYS calls to quickly copy or search memory blocks (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=302) and to perform integer multiplication and division (at67, https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?p=2062#p2062). All these new calls are listed with suffix "_v6" in "interface.json" (https://github.com/kervinck/gigatron-ro ... rface.json)
- Unified vIRQ support (https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?p=3462#p3462).