We’ll wrap up our tour by looking more closely at the MSX1 system. The general structure here will be the same as the SG-1000 and the ColecoVision: we’ll look at all the parts of the system that we need to interface with in order to create the platform layer for our little shooting gallery program, […]| Bumbershoot Software
Last week’s article wrote a port of my little shooting gallery Rosetta Stone program to the SG-1000, then abstracted a more portable core that could power versions on the ColecoVision and the MSX. I glossed over the details of the actual ports, though, and the SG-1000-specific parts were largely covered in a previous post. This […]| Bumbershoot Software
Now that I’ve created a support structure for the SG-1000 with rough parity to the basics of the ColecoVision and MSX BIOS ROMs, I’m in a position to take on the first of the projects t…| Bumbershoot Software
Last week I introduced three systems whose hardware was very similar to one another and also relied on chips first introduced to the market by the more ill-fated TI-99/4A. In order to get a better …| Bumbershoot Software
My series of TI-99/4A posts earlier this year turned out to be surprisingly popular, but I had really originally intended it as a stepping stone: its graphics and sound chips were extremely influential and either were directly included in many later systems or significantly inspired their designs. That influence runs very late: despite being introduced […]| Bumbershoot Software
This week I’m wrapping up my revisit of my Sega Genesis port of the Cyclic Cellular Automaton. There’s a fairly large grab bag of remaining tasks: The logo screen should fade out gradua…| Bumbershoot Software
Last week I created a new set of logo and font graphics for my old Sega Genesis project. These were much larger than the original graphics I used, so I ran it through the LZ4 compression algorithm to get the size down to a more comfortable level. Now we need to get those graphics on […]| Bumbershoot Software
With last week’s adventures done, we’d revisited and re-optimized some Sega Genesis code to bring its performance up to par with the SNES. While we’re at it, the rest of the CCA program is not really up to par. To get that part to catch up, we face three main tasks: Except for the dedicated […]| Bumbershoot Software
When I poked at developing for the SNES a year and a half ago, the capstone project was the same as it was for my much earlier Sega Genesis project: an implementation of the Cyclic Cellular Automat…| Bumbershoot Software
After getting the ZX Spectrum port of Lights-Out to a place where I was happy with it, I turned to the Commodore 64 version. This was the very first platform I wrote Lights-Out for, and the initial…| Bumbershoot Software
The last time I tried my hand at Sega Genesis development, I first looked at the extremely full-featured SGDK and then decided that I preferred a system where I had more explicit control over every…| Bumbershoot Software
Last time, I took a bunch of my old DOS C projects and put them through the modern Watcom cross-compiler instead of through the version of Borland Turbo C I’d originally intended them for. Th…| Bumbershoot Software
Most of the projects I’ve done on this blog are written in assembly language, and for DOS, that meant NASM. However, I learned C and Pascal on DOS, relying mostly on Borland’s compilers…| Bumbershoot Software
Well, here we are. Six weeks after announcing my hiatus, and two months or so after actually writing and scheduling the announcement, and the Platform Guides page is fully updated. I’ve given…| Bumbershoot Software
Last week, I poked around in the C language at both the implementation of a simple linked-list structure and a method for allocating memory for that list without any special language or OS support.…| Bumbershoot Software
Last week’s adventures revolved around TI BASIC and its extensions. Those extensions were shipped as cartridges, or, in TI parlance, “command modules.” This week we’ll trans…| Bumbershoot Software
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at an architecture that’s completely new to me, and I haven’t done any since creating my new scheme for dedicated platform guides. I’…| Bumbershoot Software
Last week I implemented a few routines that would operate on a singly-linked list data structure on the Motorola 68000 CPU. Despite dating from 1979, the 68000 instruction set sits well enough with…| Bumbershoot Software
This week we’ll finish the little Amiga 500 shooting gallery game we’ve been writing. The last step, as it was in its Atari parallels, is to expand the animation and simulation systems …| Bumbershoot Software
Last time, we wrote a program that boasted it was displaying 64 colors at once, but which actually was only displaying four—two, if we don’t count backgrounds. Today we’ll boost that co…| Bumbershoot Software
It’s time I went back and finished my tour of the Amiga 500. In my previous adventures, I learned to operate it as an end user and to write and build software for it with a convenient cross-p…| Bumbershoot Software
Last time, we designed and implemented most of a line-drawing bitmap library. The overall goal was to match the system I’d used to port John Jainschigg’s Portrait of Liberty program int…| Bumbershoot Software
We’ve worked through the basics of changing the graphics mode and writing bitmap data, and we’ve taken a closer look at Bresenham’s Line Algorithm and simplified the implementatio…| Bumbershoot Software
Last time, we got some high-resolution graphics out of the Dragon. However, it was essentially only doing “blitting” operations—we were copying out neatly byte-aligned rectangles of dat…| Bumbershoot Software
So far I’ve been rather haphazard in exploring the Dragon and the Color Computer it’s based on—once I got a working toolchain, I started putting the CPU through its paces with a decentl…| Bumbershoot Software
We have, at this point, put the Dragon’s 6809 CPU through its paces quite well. Its instruction set is powerful and general enough that even adapting code intended for a 16-bit machine ended …| Bumbershoot Software
It’s now time for me to turn to the last of the three systems I hoped to look at this year: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. I didn’t have a lot of experience with the SNES in i…| Bumbershoot Software