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Yeah, it's a property of music done in tracker format. I think MIDI-like music will fare better, as at least in theory you would just adjust the note lengths. Back in the Nerdtracker2 days, I used to enforce a 50Hz "master" record in the replay engine, just naively pausing every 6th beat. NTSC versi...

I can't help to think of the Megaman series... First game had you pick up an energy tank to play the end fanfare and supposedly acquire the robot master's powerup(?) This explanation of always felt a bit redundant to me compared to MM2's more minimalistic victory fanfare followed by a teleport - no ...

Gosh, can't believe I completely missed him passing away earlier this month.

RIP father of my favorite CPU ever. Today I'll be wearing my 6502 "Micro Memories" T-shirt more consciously than usual...

I did watch the film and must say that I thought that Joe and the other guy were really quite disrespectful, taking the piss out of the people he went to for help in quite a nasty way (how they were dressed, their names), I was put very much in mind of jocks going to nerds for homework help while s...

To add to the reviews: I backed the original campaign, and tried a version just slightly newer than the first Kickstarter release. (4.0.11 to be specific) I haven't really touched it since then though, as I didn't find the experience all that enjoyable, and it felt like I was spending too much time ...

It doesn't support self-flashing yet, I'll have to add it later. Feel free to re-purpose the code from my Powerpak mapper30 implementation if it makes things easier for you. (if I understand the wiki correctly, the self-flashing sequence should be more or less the same on both) Edit: Oops! You want...

Apparently you can solder an USB port to the Everdrive N8. Actually, you can get it pre-soldered on the Everdrive N8 at no extra cost if you ask nicely when placing your order. Or well, that worked for me when I ordered mine around 2 years ago. The USB feature is indeed awesome and transfers both N...

The C64 used 1000 bytes to store character data and 1000 bytes of color attributes; Oh yes, I totally forgot about the color attributes. That makes the VSP trick even more crucial for this port. Using the even/odd scroll technique would allow the screen to scroll 8 pixels/frame using less than half...

Is this an SNES-style port -- are they compatible? No, neither geometry nor pin position. Physically it's more shaped like the FDS data cable. I have one of these NES's and seem to recall that - to my surprise - the cable is not just similar to the FDS, but fitted perfectly. Maybe not much of a sur...

For playback rate $C, we have a period of $06A = 106 cycles on NTSC. This means 106*8 = 848 cycles until an interrupt hits. Or ~7.46 scanlines. This leaves us with 0.54 of a scanline, to do the work in our IRQ handler, or 61.3 CPU cycles. This should be plenty of time to enter the IRQ handler, writ...

I sort of struggle to see what MMC2 / MMC4 would provide that a scanline IRQ couldn't, except for a modest amount of saved CPU cycles. Using a scanline IRQ would require a relatively complex mapper chip. While MMC2/MMC4 are somewhat fancy, a game designed for MMC2 could be readily adapted for a dis...

And if you can live without the DMC channel in your game's music, you may not even need a mapper-based IRQ, but could use the DMC channel's IRQ as explained on the wiki: https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/APU_DMC I'm pretty sure you'd lose a lot of CPU time if you used this trick multiple times pe...

I think MMC2 and MMC4 could easily almost double the number tiles, by having each row start with either a "switch to set 0" or "switch to set 1" tile. Going from 64 tiles to ~120 would be a big improvement. Not sure if I'd find myself wanting more than 120 tiles, but I can easily see 64 as being in...

supercat wrote: The C64 used 1000 bytes to store character data and 1000 bytes of color attributes;

Oh yes, I totally forgot about the color attributes. That makes the VSP trick even more crucial for this port.

As far as I know it, on the C64, there are registers for a fine scroll of only 0..7, after which point games normally have to manually shift the entire screen data by 1 column. Exactly. The 8-pixel scroll helps a lot, but on an NTSC system in particular, the shifting of the entire screen willl take...