Home Page Forums MAME MAME 8bit Apples - Apple I, II, /// and the 16 bit GS

That makes sense with regards to the high-bit.

I tried setting the ssc to 7 bit and the printer to 7 bit but it didn't seem to work properly, inserting spurious 7f characters.

PR#1, PRINT "TESTING 7 BIT" and it comes out mangled. Looks like 8 bit is the way to go.

Yes, it's normal behavior, as RB said. Apple "normal" mode text has at least the seventh bit set (i.e. #$80-FF); flash mode has only the sixth bit set (#$40-7F), inverse has neither bit set (i.e. #$00-3F), and you might notice that there's no lowercase in flash or inverse because of the restricted range.
No, you can't switch to 7-bit, because when it was 8-bit originally, you'll get the marker to say that a conversion happened, as you can see.
You'll have to send in 8-bit form, and then perform the conversion after the data arrive.

Just for fun, I was fiddling with the arcbd and was able to get the MLDEMO to do something by adding this to a2arcadebd.cpp.

I don't know how correct this is, but they seem to run.

void a2bus_arcboard_device::write_c0nx(address_space &space, uint8_t offset, uint8_t data)
{
switch (offset)
{
case 0:
m_tms->vram_write(space, 0, data);
break;
case 1:
m_tms->register_write(space, 0, data);
break;


./mame64 apple2e -sl4 arcbd -flop1 Amparcade_1983_Third_Millenium_Engineering_Corporation.do -debug






It's interesting that in this article from Creative Computing that the mountain scene gets horizontally flipped left/right.




and the VDPTEST program runs now

before:

with the change:

I got inspired and thought I'd take a stab at making a driver for the supersprite board basically copying the arcbd source and it works!

I hooked up the tms5220 and it has speech too. Amazing.

./mame64 apple2e -sl7 ssprite -flop1 StarSprite\ Demonstration.DSK -debug

The glitching is caused by the same issue, but I can't see how to fix it without rewriting the driver to use a timer to control screen updating.
The 80-column firmware does a lot of switching between pages, faster than the hardware can refresh the display, but each switch triggers a screen update in MAME.

Oh, that sucks. The French Touch demos flip page 1 / page 2 mid-scanline and expect it to change the display immediately. (BTW, they posted the source for all their stuff if you missed it).

Alive as ... a Do-Do

http://forum.classic-computing.de/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=11845

This thread contains the ROMs for an Apple II clone which has "Do-Do" as its signon message

I've been noticing that the sound output from the apple2e driver has a lot of "pops and crackles." It must be coming from the Mockingboard because it disappears if I bring up the ` volume sliders and set the volume for each AY channel to zero. It has a very regular pattern, almost like someone typing.

Is there a way to disable the Mockingboard from the command line as it seems to be hard wired in the driver? Like -sl4 empty_slot? I suppose I could always just comment it out and recompile.

MCFG_A2BUS_SLOT_ADD("a2bus", "sl4", apple2_cards, "mockingboard")

You can hear it in this video in the background:

You can empty a slot from the command line, e.g. -sl4 "" (two double quotes with nothing between them), or you can put something like a mouse card in the slot instead.

I've never gotten that noise. I suspect your system isn't able to keep up with full frame rate with the Mockingboard installed. Enable the MAME keys and press F11 to monitor that - if it drops below 100% when you hear the crackles that's what's happening.