Posted By
Degauss
on 2007-01-16
05:45:16
|  TED-Documentation
From coding experience i gathered a fuzzy and unsharp knowledge of what happens on different HScan's and VScans within the TED: When does this or that register trigger this or that counter etc.... I think every +4-Coder has some sort of this "secret knowledge".
I'd like to ask if there is anybody other than me interested in expanding the Encyclopedia about those TED-Intestines? (Gaia probably has the deepest knowledge of this, but his knowledge is kind of his capital...)
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Posted By
TLC
on 2007-01-16
17:03:17
| Re: TED-Documentation
Hi Degauss! I'd say, gathering these things together would be a good idea. A handful of us should have valuable experiences in this field; documenting what we know and putting these things together would make up for a fairly good knowledge base, as I guess. Personally, I've got two concerns. First, for most of us to work together, some conditions should be met. I can't speak for others, but as I presume, this should be a set of common rules, that we all accept. If this is met, things could get a boost. Second. For such a knowledge base, I'd personally expect if it was explicitely released under some kind of a creative commons license; in other words, before I'd even consider writing just a single row of text, I want anyone to be officially and explicitely permitted to use and reproduce the content in whole or in part, provided that the creators and the source are shown. I guess I better wait for what Csabo has to say about this (and what others think about the idea). ...Other than that, I've got just one concern -- time. But something like this knowledge base should make it up for the effort.
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2007-01-16
17:30:28
| Re: TED-Documentation
I thought about this as well, even started writing down stuff in a structured manner, but believe it or not, it is more time consuming than writing an emulator. How I'd imagine this, is to provide actual proof along the lines in the form of test code, oscilloscope measurements and logical deductions. What TLC has mentioned about the license and spare time (or the lack thereof) is of course also valid. Maybe we could do a Wiki-page for it?
By the way, I did make a 1551 ROM disassembly (based on a 1541 one) that might have gone unnoticed:
http://yape.homeserver.hu/download/C1551.ASM
It's small, it's yellow, it's sour, but it's ours 
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Posted By
SVS
on 2007-01-17
03:32:54
 | Re: TED-Documentation
Pals you're resuming one of my old ideas. I've already asked for this, time ago in the forum and directly Csabo, who has started the Plys4 Encyclopedia.
However, in my Ultimate-Map I've already put in, every info I've read / discovered / invented.
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Posted By
TLC
on 2007-01-17
07:21:11
| Re: TED-Documentation
Yes, editing and maintaining would be the easiest in a wiki. (This would also inherently provide logging and document history).
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2007-01-17
09:20:10
| Re: TED-Documentation
Well, I'm okay for everything 
I do hate all the legal bullsh*t though in every form, probably because I'm ignorant about it, and I've been lucky that I never really needed to deal with it. If you look at what I do personally: I releases all my software(PC utilities and Plus/4 programs) with full source. I typed up a lot of stuff into this website. I even sent full db dumps to people who asked for it. It's obviously available to everyone, that's the purpose. But I never said this is GPL or this license or that - because I truly don't care what you guys do with it. You could even grab this for money and sell it or whatever - good luck with that Perhaps this just shows that you guys need to get involved with this site a bit more, so that we can have some kind of 'management', you know, make up mission statements and organize things a bit more. Perhaps that's too much to ask.
Sure I started the Encyclopedia, but it's just not catching on. In one way it will make me sad to see a wiki that's not part of Plus/4 World, but as long as it's useful to the scene, go and do it. The encyclopedia is sort of like a wiki, it's trying to get there, it has some of it's features already, but there's still some more work needed. (Oh, if that's not clear: we can't set one up on this server because of insufficient rights.)
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Posted By
Degauss
on 2007-01-17
12:30:40
| Re: TED-Documentation
I agree with Csabo. License-Concerns and Format-Types (Wiki) are things i don't like to think about. And i think they aren't of any importance.
In my eyes the Encyclopedia is the right place and offers enough functionality. The only "nice thing" would be the possibility to have an ASCII-Dump of the Encyclopedia - once there is enough content in it. (ASCII = barrier-free-surfing)
I offer my self to type in the TED-Registers in the Encyclopedia the next Weekend. I can imagine that some can add more infos per Register (e.g. The $FF06 = $FF1D DMA-Trigger).
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2007-01-17
12:47:40
| Re: TED-Documentation
But, with all that being said, I actually wouldn't mind if we do put some license on it. As long as someone else is in charge of figuring out what that license should be.
Also don't forget there's already a TED registers topic started in the Encyclopedia.
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Posted By
Bionic
on 2007-01-17
13:27:37
| Re: TED-Documentation
Actually the official documentation is already surprisingly accurate and detailed. Maybe converting that to a proper format could be a start?
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Posted By
Degauss
on 2007-01-17
20:35:17
| Re: TED-Documentation
@Bionic:
Yeah, i was surprised to find the different "events" that occur on specific H-Positions in the docu. It is indeed a good start - the different format should be a bit more "demo-centric" in my opinion
(for example i found it hard to interpretate the different h-events. another thing is TLCs description of the "strange" behaviour of the oscillators when they're set to high frequencies)
@Csabo:
What about a Csabo-License: "It's free, use it but give credits" (oh no, that was the BSD-License, wasn't it?)
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Posted By
Bionic
on 2007-01-22
14:17:14
| Re: TED-Documentation
I started typing in the Plus/4 HW manual (probably just to see how long it takes ). I mostly finished pages 2-11. It is a word document, but could be easily converted to anything else (Latex, html ,wiki).
Anybody wants to join me?
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Posted By
Degauss
on 2007-01-22
14:29:32
| Re: TED-Documentation
Yeah! Me ofcourse! Delegate!
(But i will only have spare time at the end of the week...)
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Posted By
Bionic
on 2007-01-22
14:49:48
| Re: TED-Documentation
I tried something new: I pasted the document to google docs. (docs.google.com). If you have a google account I can add you as a collaborators and you can work on the file too.
The document can be viewed here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dqtj9nx_14qxqxc&revision=_published
I can also send the word file by mail..
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Posted By
NinjaDRM
on 2007-02-02
01:55:44
| Re: TED-Documentation
I think a TED-article (or wiki or whatever) with content similar to the VIC-article would be a good idea. The hardware manual is surely a good start (I wish there was something like this for VIC), but still some descriptions of how to use what in order to get this effect would help new people joining in. I believe that good people like JackAsser would not have entered the c64-scene, if it wasn't for such easily accesible information (BTW thumbs up to Csabo for releasing his sourcecodes!).
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2007-02-09
04:21:15
| Re: TED-Documentation
I have some thoughts about TED-documentation format... I think that the description of the TED registers is not enough. We need in addition two columns table which 1st column consists of condition for TED action and 2nd - description of this TED action. For examle, if in the 1st badline at position $bd ([$ff1e]) y-offset ([$ff06]&7) is equal to current low 3 bits of line number ([$ff1d]) then next line will be 2nd bad line. This table may consists less than 30 events. It is not easy to fill completely such table but if we start to do it then this table begins its growth!
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2007-04-03
04:34:45
| Re: TED-Documentation
The events of the last few days reminded me of this old thread DrDeath has started. To avoid such accusations in the future, it would be good indeed to document everything we know about the TED. Therefore I decided that I contribute to what Bionic has already started. As time permits I will write down what I know even if it's not implemented in Yape, yet.
BTW: Litwr, the 5 magics effect has a bug in Yape 0.72 that I overlooked. In case you are interested: the DMA has the same reload mechanism like the character position counters (whose reload register is FF1A/B) only their events happen 1 cycle earlier than that one (I think the C64's DMA works similarly like this and it is also mentioned in the infamous "VIC-II Article"). This have been verified by TLC in as early as 2004. I never implemented it until recently because it required a rewrite (or a new emulation mode). The 5 magics effect skips the cycle where the DMA position counter is latched to the reload register, so by the time the next reload happens, it will use the "old" reload value of 40 and not that of the extended lines (41) since a latch there could never occur (this is now fixed).
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Posted By
Degauss
on 2007-04-25
19:10:07
| Re: TED-Documentation
I just wanted to bring this on top because i found a thing i don't understand:
When you set $FF06 to enable the ECM-Mode and you have set $FF13 to point at $FC00, you get wrong results (=> not the character graphics that you have put there). Funny stuff! Can someone explain this?
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Posted By
indi
on 2007-04-26
05:14:27
| Re: TED-Documentation
Well, the Plus4 has some non-paging memory up there. Whats called the Pheonix rom banking routine sits at $fc00 and does not change, so my guess is that your seeing that routine as characters.
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Posted By
siz
on 2007-04-26
05:16:13
| Re: TED-Documentation
In ECM the TED automatically switches to 256 character mode instead of 128+reverse mode.
In that mode the chacaracter set address LSB is ignored. (So character set must be at $x000 or $x800 )
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2007-04-26
05:26:34
| Re: TED-Documentation
I can't check right now, but address bits A14 and A13 are ignored in ECM mode. So character mask data would then in your case will be read from $F800 instead of $FC00. It's much like when the reverse bit is set.
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