L System 256 colour demo + screen transitions

[Hurray Banana]

Woot Woot I've got a puzznic

Is it Puzznic WITH naked chicks or WITHOUT naked chicks? If it's the former then you've have 27010 tile/sprite roms on board, which means 8192 tiles. If it's the latter then you'll have 27512 tile/sprite roms on board, which means 4096 tiles.

it's got chicks on it

toshiba 571000 eproms

Hurray Banana2015-08-10 22:09:48

 

[cmonkey]

Then you, sir, can have either 8192 tiles (8x8 pix) or 2048 sprites (16x16 pix) or any combination of those.

And long live the 15 colour naked Japanese chicks called Tina and Judy! I wonder what they're doing these days?

 

[ben76]

Did a test... and I will have messed it up somewhere... lol

took me a while to install my programmer as I had my hard drive die over the weekend but burnt to 27c512's as a like for like swap on the pcb already?

Anyway on original chips...



Vid...

- Ben

 

[cmonkey]

Thanks a million for testing Ben. I don't believe it's anything you've done wrong. I'm willing to bet that when you put the Flipull roms back in the board that everything was OK.

What you're seeing there are similar results to the ones that I saw when I first tested this code on my Plotting board. I was adamant that it was a failed ram chip (one of the 4 x 32Kb 62256 rams that make up the combined tile/sprite/text ram) so I started piggybacking known good rams on top of the existing ones. When I piggybacked the ram at IC4 the problem went away. So I desoldered IC4 and tested it out of circuit and it was fine! Weird huh! So I socketed IC4, put the original ram back, put the original Plotting roms back in and powered it up (Plotting does extensive ram tests on boot and would have reported any problems with the ram at IC4 if there were any). No issues were observed and the game played fine.

Put my 256 colour demo roms back in and got similar artefacts to the results you're seeing above. So I piggybacked the ram @ IC1 and the issue went away. But as soon as I remove the piggybacked ram the issue comes back. Putting the Plotting roms back in and powering the cab up shows that there's nothing wrong with IC1 during ram tests at boot.

So I'm a bit baffled. I checked my voltages and was getting exactly 5v when measured across a few different chips so I even tried boosting the voltage to 5.2v at the chips to see if my demo code was particularly power hungry. Didn't cure it.

So here I am with a demo that only works correctly if the ram @ IC1 is piggybacked with a known good ram, even though there's actually nothing wrong with the ram @ IC1.

All the boot up init code in this demo is exactly the same as it's been in all the rest of the homebrew stuff that I've done and they've all been fine so that leads me to believe that the L System doesn't really like to be pushed quite as hard as this. This is another reason why it's probably not wise to run it for extended periods of time.

I've just done a test where I've changed the code slightly so that it does the screen transitions stuff first then does the 256 colour demo at the end of the screen transitions section. I assembled the binary and burned it to my EEPROM and tested it without the piggybacked ram @ IC1 and the screen transitions section worked perfectly, with no issues or corruption. When it got to the 256 colour demo and I switched palettes from the 256 colour palette to the 220 colour palette I started to get graphical corruption and missing colours in the palette rotation routine.

If I were a betting man I'd say that the palette rotation routine pushes the L System right to the very edge of its capabilities and it starts to get unreliable at that point with varying visual results. I think I'm going to submit the code to Taito and ask them to fix up their sh*t!

Anyway, I'm attaching the rejigged binary which does screen transitions first and then 256 colour demo. Please give this a try for me and let me know if it's any different.

I also noted on your video that all sound effects seemed to play during the screen transitions and all were at the same volume. Was that the case? If so then there must be something wrong with the sound hardware on my board because I only get 3 sound effects which play at normal volume level and the rest play really quietly (almost inaudible). Maybe I need to chuck this Plotting board and look for another one.

https://www.ukvac.com/forum/data/uploads/1497/256_demo_ic10.zip

 

[ben76]

The sounds seemed to be the same level on each screen change. I can send you this pcb if you want? I'll also give the latest chipset a try tomorrow at some point. If you want the pcb for testing lmk
Will report back

- Ben

 

[ben76]

Oh and yeah the pcb is fine the pic if after putting the roms back.

- Ben

 

[cmonkey]

A million thanks for this Ben. And thanks for the offer of the board but I've already got a hoard of about 10 L System boards in their various different configurations, so I won't be needing yours. I'll test my code on a Puzznic board tomorrow to see how it goes but I defo think that there's something wrong with the audio on my Plotting board, although the sound effects and music in Plotting itself seems to be just fine.

 

[ben76]

Test 2... Had to be quick as my phone has a low battery. The sounds were present each screen change and all the same level of volume. Lines still there the only different rom was ic10 that I changed to the one in your second file.

What's next guv'

- Ben

 

[cmonkey]

Thanks for testing this for me Ben. How many volts are you getting at the ICs? I assume that everything was fine when you put the Flipull roms back in again?

One thing's for certain, the PSG channels from the sound chip on my Plotting board definitely seem to be borked as the sound is playing perfectly on your board, exactly the same as it sounds in MAME.

I'm a bit stumped to be honest. I'm gonna try this code on my Puzznic board to see how it fairs.

Thanks once again for testing.

I owe you a beer or three at the next event.

 

[ben76]

Didn't check the voltage tbh as the game runs fine as original. You don't owe me anything mate. I can't help with the technical side but can with testing and I'm more than happy too as it's awesome stuff

Oh and what sound chip is it as I may have a spare?

- Ben

 

[cmonkey]

It's a Yamaha YM2203. Thankfully the one on my Plotting board is already socketed. Not sure whether it's the sound chip that's borked or the sound amplification circuit that the PSG channels go through. The FM channels of the sound chip work perfectly which makes me think it's probably something in the amplification, but then what do I know.

 

[ben76]

Without looking think I have quite a few of them off scrap pcbs if you want some lmk and I'll go check

- Ben

 

[cmonkey]

If you're passing your pile of scrappers and happen to see a socketed YM2203 then pull it and let me know your paypal so that I can stick you a few quid in. But don't go out of your way if you're not passing specifically dude.

 

[Sokurah]

...but I defo think that there's something wrong with the audio on my Plotting board, although the sound effects and music in Plotting itself seems to be just fine.

Couldn't it be because the original game uses the FM channels and your demo (and my project) uses the PSG channels? Since one of them needs a -5v line and the other doesn't, it seems like one could be affected by "something" and the other not being affected by it. That might be the reason for the strange volume problem.

 

[cmonkey]

Plotting uses PSG audio for effects like when you throw the block and when the block collides with the other blocks, etc. It also uses the FM channels for the background music. All sound effects appear to be playing correctly when I put the Plotting roms back in my board. -5v line is fine in my JAMMA cab.

What I do know for definite is that the sound effect playback routine is working almost perfectly. I made a small change to it and I need to submit the changed source to you so that you can make the changes in your project.

I just tried my 256 colour demo on my Puzznic board and there were no graphics at all! Just completely blank screens for the screen transition part of the demo then full screen flashing colours for the 256 colour part of the demo! Weird huh!

But at least the sound effects worked perfectly on the Puzznic board!

I *hate* it when stuff works perfectly in MAME and gives no end of trouble when deployed to hardware. Makes me wanna quit dev'ing for hardware and just dev in MAME all the time. But there's something so satisfying about seeing your own code running on hardware that it drives you on, even through all the sh*t that it throws at you.

 

[Sokurah]

I *hate* it when stuff works perfectly in MAME and gives no end of trouble when deployed to hardware. Makes me wanna quit dev'ing for hardware and just dev in MAME all the time. But there's something so satisfying about seeing your own code running on hardware that it drives you on, even through all the sh*t that it throws at you.

I does take some of the magic away if you can't run it on the real hardware though.

PS. I'll reply to your mail in a couple of days.

 

[Robert]

A new demo for HBMAME ! What is the best game to start with? Puzznic, Plotting, or something else?

Is the new ic10 preferred over the one in the original post?

 

[cmonkey]

This is one of those strange phenomenon whereby the demo works *perfectly* in MAME but exhibits issues when deployed to hardware. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the cause of the issues are when running on hardware but I believe the demo may be pushing the hardware too hard. As MAME doesn't emulate the true capability of an arcade board it will emulate it perfectly, as it was designed and coded to behave. The effects of the adjustable scanline delay to show the visible artefacts when running the palette rotation routine in the active raster area will only be visible when running this either on original hardware or through MAME hooked up to a CRT with the -syncrefresh -waitvsync options enabled.

The release in the original post is the correct one and the rom names are targeted for Plotting, although it will run, as is, on Puzznic once the rom names have been changed to the ones that Puzznic expects.

 

[Robert]

Thanks

Worked immediately, no problem.

Another fantastic effort from you!

It will be in the next HBMAME, which will be 0.165

Robert2015-08-12 15:01:20

 

[cmonkey]

Cheers!

No the big scrolling text doesn't change to '220' when you swap palettes, I was too lazy to change it in the code.

I only added the 220 colour palette at the last minute as I thought the contrast between all the colours was better using that palette and it resulted in a more striking look.

It's just a shame that it doesn't seem to want to work as well on hardware as it does in MAME.