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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 18, 2016 10:10:09 GMT
I will do.
The main problem with the emulation is that, as far as I know, either VDC chip is not particularly well emulated. (Well, not anywhere near perfect anyway).
I'm hoping that I can develop the dot clock pushing and corruption curing side of things whilst someone else (hint hint: sjray! Lol) can sort out some sort of colour ramdac or something along those lines.
Put together, and if it all goes well, this could really rock the C128 graphics scene! :-)
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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 18, 2016 9:47:17 GMT
Thanks for the heads up Robert. :-)
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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 18, 2016 9:43:04 GMT
Miro, whilst I am very happy that the C128 is getting some attention that it so justly deserves, I'm not sure that for me, personally, I would really find this unit useful.
I have several Retro machines (ST,Amiga,C64,etc) and will probably never want a LAN for any of them. Also a RTC is of no real consequence either. And I really can't justify setting up yet another monitor for yet another standard VDC display.
Im not sure where these 100 8563 VDC chips are going to come from, but as you could probably tell, I'm not the greatest fan of poaching a classic machine for its major IC's. However, that's my opinion and each to their own.
Please don't take this as me being negative about your project. I'm glad that you want to contribute something to the C128 community.
Its just I, myself, would not really use it as there would be such a small userbase (I'm still conflicted as to whether to do stuff for the DTV) and therefore very limited use to the 128 community as a whole.
Using the '63 instead of the '68 and the 100 Euro cost pretty much kills it for me too.
Sorry! :-)
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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 18, 2016 8:32:26 GMT
This is exactly what I am attempting to build ATM. The only thing I found online about VDC speed was that someone had o/c'd a '63 VDC but it would only do 20mhz.
I've ordered 18/20/22/24 MHz crystals and am trying to get some 60ns or lower drams too. Im hoping that the more mature process/revision of the '68 over the '63 will allow for a higher overclock speed. I then have to build a piggyback board (a bit like the '63 to '68 VDC upgrade board) with the clock,xtal and ram chips on and perhaps a nice big heat sink for good measure. Its then a case of tweaking the registers to get a stable picture.
I'm not too sure that the o/c will yield any particularly practical resolutions; perhaps if it was 1992 and we could still get hold of CRT multi sync monitors that would accept 16-30khz signals, then it would have more impact in the community. (Either that or reducing the h.char count to squeeze it up to meet 31khz like in Tokra's VGA mania demo). Maybe a combination of both higher dot clock and squeezing the displayed characters down a bit is the best option. Its all theory for now though.
However, I do hold out hope that the faster dram speeds will cure the higher resolution character corruption problems which are the main stopping factor in resolution enhancements. I believe the VDC was designed with the (broken) option to produce higher resolutions, but lacked the physical ability to, as the C= engineers were just about able to get the chip working at its standard 80 column setting so wouldn't have had time to test for all other programmatical possibilities of the unit and I very much doubt that they were thinking of maximum theoretical resolutions when selecting ram speed.
At least, putting the chip onto a test bed circuit with variable clock speeds and not restricted to any memory holdups, I should be able to figure out a bit more about what the chip is capable of.
Oh, and if anyone is wondering why its taking me so long; I have been waiting 1 month for a donor 128DCR machine to arrive and am currently waiting for a few bits from China (DIL socket,crystals) and I'm also trying to source the fastest drams that I can! :-)
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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 12, 2016 18:47:09 GMT
Great! Good work Miro. I will keep a lookout.
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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 12, 2016 18:36:16 GMT
Thanks for the info Steve.
Have you considered a project for the C128? :-)
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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 3, 2016 5:16:59 GMT
Yes! That was it! :-)
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Post by mrbombermillzy on Jun 2, 2016 5:26:32 GMT
It seems like most of the really good c64/128 (actually, C= in general) tech was made in Germany back in the day.
I recently came across a website that documented the products that were made by a German company Scantronik; there were digitizers, scanners, genlocks, etc. Unfortunately, I cant find the link anymore to that site, but I was impressed! :-)
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Post by mrbombermillzy on May 29, 2016 18:57:08 GMT
Did he tell you what German company/person made or distributed the program?
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Post by mrbombermillzy on May 26, 2016 5:24:22 GMT
I'm not sure what happened. There are no scorched components or dark marks that I can see. I bought the C128DCR as a non working unit a while ago and it was just the PSU that was faulty.
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