Oswald information 322 glöps
- general:
- level: user
- personal:
- first name: Zoltan
- last name: Tallosy
- demo Windows Mathturbation by Nazareth [web]
- fucking great but too short, should have been more scenes
- rulezadded on the 2013-04-15 18:04:09
- demo Atari STe Circus back²STage by Blabla [web] & Sector One [web] & Cocoon [web]
- speccy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x292Y8YR2xA
atari: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpOwp5TzMJE - isokadded on the 2013-04-05 08:21:05
- demo Windows Glenz vector from Hell by Razor 1911 [web]
- hell yes, now we're talking awesome shit!!!
- rulezadded on the 2013-04-02 19:42:43
- demo Atari STe Circus back²STage by Blabla [web] & Sector One [web] & Cocoon [web]
- its hard to understand what's so technically great in a bunch of fixed texture displacers and palette rotated converted pictures in 2013. come on, we have seen env mapped shit already on 8 bit few mhz computers and more...
- sucksadded on the 2013-04-02 18:49:08
- demo Amiga AGA Machinist by Elude [web]
- my nr 1
- rulezadded on the 2013-04-02 13:12:48
- demo Amiga AGA Smoke & Mirrors by Ghostown & Loonies [web]
- nice, but got bored halfway trough, too much scene and effect recycling (all scenes shown like atleast 4 times? meh). nice design, but no surprises, just all the scene cliches nicely wrapped.
- rulezadded on the 2013-04-02 13:05:23
- 1k Atari XL/XE Plasma1k by Noice [web]
- could use 5th color, and nicer palettes. palettes made up from the same hue are boring, and feel dead. also the atari could make 4 pixel high chars, and the cpu power is there to run that fast enough.
- isokadded on the 2013-03-18 18:07:22
- demo Atari XL/XE Forever or Never by Oxyron [web]
- no piggie for Graham, still for me it feels like "late 90's c64 effects called..." on atari :) fex. that plasma could change the raster colors atleast if not a straight copy ? the rotzoom was nice tho. very little effort on design for 2013. could have been a killer in 97.
- rulezadded on the 2013-03-18 17:56:55
- demo ZX Spectrum New Wave 48k by alone coder & Mayhem & HOOY-PROGRAM [web]
- cool panorama scene. is it drawing only one layer, or each soldier is a diff sprite?
- rulezadded on the 2013-03-17 17:14:05
- demo Commodore 64 Safe vsp by lft [web]
- Here's LFT's full scrolltext, cleaned up for easy reading:
Technical lowdown:
The dreaded VSP crash is caused by a metastability condition in the dram. Some
have speculated that it has to do with refresh cycles, but hopefully the
detailed explanation in this scroller will crush that myth once and for all.
But first, this is what the machine behaves like from a programmer's point of
view. Let us call memory locations ending in 7 or F fragile. Sometimes when
VSP is performed, several fragile memory cells are randomly corrupted
according to the following rule: each bit in a fragile memory cell might be
changed into the corresponding bit of another fragile cell within the same
page.
This specific behaviour can be exploited in several ways: one approach is to
ensure that every fragile byte in a page is identical. If the page contains
code, for instance, corruption is avoided if all the fragile bytes are $ea
(nop). Similarly, in font definitions, the bottom line of each character could
be blank.
Another technique is to simply avoid all fragile memory locations. The
undocumented opcode $80 (nop immediate) can be used to skip them. Data
structures can be designed to have gaps in the critical places.
This latter technique is used in this demo, including the music player of
course. Data that cannot have gaps, i.e. graphics, is continuously restored
from safe copies elsewhere in memory. You can use shift lock to disable this
repair, and eventually you should see garbage accumulating on the screen. And
yet the code will keep running.
Thus, for the first time, the VSP crash has been tamed.
Now for the explanation. The c64 accesses memory twice in every clock cycle.
each memory access begins with the lsb of the address (also known as the row
address) being placed on an internal bus connected to the dram chips. As soon
as the row address is stable, the row address strobe (ras) signal is given.
each dram chip now latches the row address into a register, and this register
controls a multiplexer which connects the selected memory row to a set of
wires called sense lines. Each sense line connects to a single bit of memory.
The sense lines have been precharged to a voltage in between logical zero and
logical one. The charge stored in the memory cell affects the sense line
towards a slightly lower or higher voltage depending on the bit value. A
feedback amplifier senses the voltage difference and exaggerates it, so that
the sense line reaches the proper voltage representing either zero or one.
because the memory cell is connected (through the multiplexer) to the sense
line, the amplified charge will also flow back and refresh the memory cell.
hence, a memory row is refreshed whenever it is opened.
Vsp is achieved by triggering a badline condition during idle mode in the
visible part of a rasterline. When this happens, the vic chip gets confused
about what memory address to access during the half-cycle following the write
to $d011. It sets the internal bus lines to 11111111 in preparation for an
idle fetch, but suddenly changes its mind and tries to read from an address
with an lsb of 00000111.
Now, since electrical lines can't change voltage instantaneously, there is a
brief moment of time when each of the changing bits (bit 3 through 7) is
neither a valid one nor a valid zero. But because the vic chip changes the
address at an abnormal time, there is now a risk that the ras signal, which is
generated independently by another part of the vic chip, is sent while one or
more bus lines is within the undefined voltage range.
When an undefined voltage is latched into a register, the register enters a
metastable state, which means that its output will flicker rapidly between
zero and one several times before settling. This has catastrophic consequences
for a dram: the row multiplexer will connect several different memory rows,
one at a time, to the same sense lines. But as soon as some charge has moved
from a memory cell to the sense line, the amplifier will pull it all the way
to a one or a zero. If, at this point, another memory row is connected, then
the charge will travel from the sense line into this other memory cell. In
short, one memory cell gets refreshed with the bit value of a different memory
cell.
Note that because the bus lines change from $ff to $07, only memory rows with
an address ending in three ones are at risk of being opened simultaneously.
this explains why corruption can only occur in memory locations ending in 7 or
F.
Finally, this phenomenon hinges on the exact timing of the ras signal at the
nanosecond level, and on many machines the critical situation simply doesn't
occur. The timing (and thus the probability of a crash) depends on factors
such as temperature, vic revision, parasitic capacitance and resistance of the
traces on the motherboard, power supply ripple and interference with other
parts of the machine such as the phase of the colour carrier with respect to
the dotclock. The latter is assigned randomly at power-on, by the way, which
could be the reason why a power-cycle sometimes helps.
This is LFT signing off. - rulezadded on the 2013-02-11 14:11:14
account created on the 2002-12-09 10:33:59
