Archive for March, 2015

A Message by the Sponsor

Thursday, March 26th, 2015

So ok, reorganized a bit of the blog structure, fixed few bugs, converted for Mobile devices …

mobile

… changed a bit the color scheme for texts (that were a bit unreadable before).

Still ToDo:
– Remove left layout, make everything on two columns;
– Fix or get rid of link tab;
– Adjust colors for Mobile theme;

I’m open to suggestions, then the blog can relive in a new form, with more tech posts and other goodies …

Halt Catch and Fire

Wednesday, March 25th, 2015

Got interested in the recent Spider WIP improvements and the correlated Table Tennis Championship development, I’ve decided to take a look at this exotic FPGA-based video blitter.
The thing is definitely weird, as Haze also explained in his blog it basically reads an i/o port to enter into “blitter mode”, and any following write to the memory mapped bus actually routes to the blitter, and using the address bus instead of the data bus either for obfuscation or performance reasons.
It’s not a novelty (Sharp X1 Japanese computer line did something similar back in 1981) but definitely a bit annoying, and the main roadblock towards emulation of this game until today:

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