Anyway, I am about to start implementing the DMC and was reading up on the Wiki documentation. It all seemed to make sense to me but something caught my attention.
From Wiki (http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/APU_DMC):
I have 2 questions regarding this:The 6502 cannot be pulled off of the bus normally. The 2A03 DMC gets around this by pulling RDY low internally. This causes the CPU to pause during the next read cycle, until RDY goes high again. The DMC unit holds RDY low for 4 cycles. The first three cycles it idles, as the CPU could have just started an interrupt cycle, and thus be writing for 3 consecutive cycles (and thus ignoring RDY). On the fourth cycle, the DMC unit drives the next sample address onto the address lines, and reads that byte from memory. It then drives RDY high again, and the CPU picks up where it left off.
This matters, because it can interfere with the expected operation of the controller registers, reads of the PPU status register, and CPU VRAM or SPR reads if they happen to occur in the same cycle that the DMC unit pulls RDY low.
1) If a sprite DMA transfer is already in progress (and therefore already in control of the bus and already deasserting the RDY signal on the CPU), does a DMC DMA operation override (interrupt) the sprite DMA process or does the DMC wait for the entire sprite RAM transfer to finish before taking control of the bus?
2) About the mention of the DMC waiting 4 CPU cycles before taking control of the bus...Does the sprite DMA transfer module do the same thing (i.e. wait 4 cycles to ensure that the CPU has finished with its last operation)? I ask because...umm...I currently don't wait for the CPU to finish its current operation before starting the sprite DMA xfer. I just pull RDY low, take control of the bus, and start the transfer. LOL, I'm thinking now that could be a bad thing.
Thanks!!