This is the first of the "Foenix Rising" Journal Recap videos; while it is numbered "5", it is the first to be put to video; however, is based on issue #5.
"Foenix Rising" is a newsletter that was published last year (July 2022 through March of 2023). It was focused squarely on the Foenix line of new-retro computers with a heavy focus on the F256, but a good browse for retro computing fans in general.
If you want more F256 (much more), hop over to the Foenix Marketplace (URL below), filter by Newsletter, then look for issues 1 through 6 (7 is in draft and will be pushed towards the end of June).
Each newsletter is between 6 and 32 pages in length and is formatted for print (but *pad or *phone works nicely as well; there are tons of links to "see more" and source information).
The early issues featured the C256 U+ platform and an introductory discussion on BASIC816 for that platform. Later issues jumped to assembly language and some intermediate topics. Sprinkled throughout are retro articles, a review of an ancient (1980) computer magazine, and a few interviews.
** Errata and follow-up notes:
a) indeed, Beethead's "Which Rules the Night" game is 512K in size. It contains 8 or 10 SID tracks in addition to all of the tile and sprite data.
b) for completeness, it's worth mentioning that the MicroKernel AND SuperBASIC cooperatively leverage the MMU LUTs for their own banks; during a recent conversation with Paul Robson, SuperBASIC had 4 banks 'worth' of code which slotted into 2 x 8K regions in the terrestrial 64K memory map. Meanwhile, MicroKernel has a larger set of banks (especially or the SD access code).
In this "BALLS" app/example, we are running on bare metal (no kernel or SuperBASIC) and use just a handful of zero page locations, $2000-$3FFF to host the banked region of the bitmap screen, and the $4000- page to accommodate the subsequent bank of which only a few dozen bytes are ever accessed. The code and data (tables, etc) for BALLS exists at $8000 (decimal 32768)
** The usual stuff
Constructive feedback and questions are welcome, and clicking the SUBSCRIBE button is much appreciated. We are just getting started, but have big plans for this channel.
** Links and/or references mentioned:
Peter's F256 manual and example github:
github.com/pwe...
Foenix Retro Discord server invite: / discord
Foenix Retro home page: c256foenix.com
Link to the Foenix Marketplace app store to download .pdf copies of Foenix Rising in addition to graphic assets, example programs, and binaries of a few dozen apps and games. This content will be refreshed at the end of June and then updated monthly on a going fwd basis:
apps.emwhite.or...
Video discussing memory use in SuperBASIC which discusses the use of the same $01:0000 region of memory for bitmapped graphics, except without all of the work (subsequent videos on use of BASIC commands will be published shortly):
• Foenix F256 SuperBASIC...
Stephen Edwards Advanced 6502 Assembly Language Tutorial which includes the BALLS demo featured in this article and ported to the Foenix F256:
• Stephen Edwards - Adva...
Stephen's [remote] interview of Bill Mensch from WDC (previously one of the founding members of MOS, the offshoot startup that defected from Motorola to create the CPU that changed everything, the MOS 6502) • Stephen Edwards and Bi...
17 сен 2024
