Gigatron Hackers

I had the same sync problem. It was only fixed with the current ROMvX0.

Thanks Hans, at least I know what I need to do now. I'm in the middle of several projects, so will have to figure out the path of least resistance.

As mentioned here, https://forum.gigatron.io/viewtopic.php?t=409, ROMvX0 pre-release versions can be, (and in this case are), incompatible with each other with respect to .gt1 files.

This is because the instruction set and/or instruction ordering is subject to change, the way around this is to always stay upto-date with the latest version of ROMvX0, for both compiling and playback of ROMvX0 applications.

Once ROMvX0 hits a stable release, it will then guarantee backwards compatibility with itself from then on.

TLDR: Just recompile your apps with the appropriate new compiler, whenever a new version of ROMvX0 is released.

I tested it again. I can't play it on my hardware. I use a Gigatron with PluggyReloaded and the 128k extension from lb3361 (extension-retro).
It only reacts very sporadically to keyboard input. Sometimes not at all and sometimes hesitantly. When it responds to the keyboard, pauses are required between two keys. You can't jump and run at the same time.
I don't know if it's my setup or if it's a general problem.

I can not test it on real hardware for some time as I don't know where my real Gigatron is packed. You cannot use 2 keys at the same time due to a limitation of the hardware. I will add in joystick support over the next week which may help.

Hans61 try this version. I did another tweak on the keyboard handler and it is more reactive in the emulator.

I have tested it. It is better. You can move the figure and also jump. (On my hardware, a second feedback would be nice) But it is not yet possible to make specific fast movements. It is also only feasible in the fastest video mode.

I have a question about GTBasic version vX0 and the RAND(X) and RND(X) functions. When doing some initial testing RND(100) seems to work as expected but RAND(100) always returns 41.
What is the difference between these 2 functions and what should I expect RAND(X) to return ?

The gtBASIC pdf says RAND is only good for initialisation code. I'm guessing it uses something hardware dependent like initial SRAM state to randomize the value so you won't see variation in the emulator and even in hardware it doesn't change after initialisation. See line 554 in https://raw.githubusercontent.com/at67/ ... ROMvX0.lst
BTW, looking forward to testing Manic Miner joystick support on the Gametron!

There is a bunch of them, including transcendental's.

The compiler generates static data using these functions at compile time. There are two reasons to use these static initialisation functions:

1) They generate no code on the Gigatron, so they are generally very cheap, (in terms of CPU cycles).
2) Use them to make look up tables so that you can perform some very expensive function in real time.