[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:32:09 +1000
Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 20 September 2013 11:02, Nick Sabalausky <
> SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 23:07:42 +1000
> > Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Atari 2600 was the only scanline renderer I know of from that
> > > time, and it certainly was made to be cheap!
> >
> > It's a genuinely impressive feat of minimalistic engineering. And it
> > makes Pitfall all the more impressive.
> >
> 
> That it was. I'm still amazed someone actually thought it was a viable
> games platform, and even more amazed that so many developers made
> games for it!
> Fancy only having a couple of hundred cycles in the vblank, and just a
> couple more cycles each hblank to perform 'game logic' ;)
> 

And the game logic (or at least the game-specific graphics kernel)
often *involved* no-ops as part of the logic! Just to get the TIA into
the desired position.

Counting cycles takes on a whole new meaning in that machine. They're
not just about performance, they're part of the logic.

> 
> The SMS was an awesome little piece of hardware... perhaps my
> favourite vintage platform :)
> The took the popular TMS9918 video chip (used in colecovision,
> sg-1000, msx, and a bunch others), and with just a couple of minor
> tweaks made the system WAY better than any of the others listed.
> All they did was added a few bytes for a user-specified clut (rather
> than a hard-coded colour table), made use of an unused bit in the
> tile gfx table to select between a second clut (doubling the number
> of available colours), and added a horizontal+vertical scroll
> register for the tilemap. The difference this made in practise was
> huge, and it's barely any more gates in the chip. I always wondered
> why TMS stopped so short of the mark... I suppose adding a
> user-defined clut is more than 16 bytes though. Fixed clut will just
> switch between some hard-wired resister circuits, a user-clut
> requires some more video output circuitry, but resisters are cheap...
> even back then.
> 

Fascinating. I had no idea.

I never did know much about the SMS. Even at the time, I only knew one
person who had one (which, at the time, was the only reason I even knew
it existed).

> 
> Aye to that; I had a lot of problems with the gnd circuit on vintage
> hardware. They were very poorly isolated, and the gnd circuit would
> often feed-back through all manner of surprising places.
> A capacitor will smooth it off a bit, maybe protect you against some
> suddenly flipping bits, or at least delay it until after a bit value
> sampling tick has happened.
> Considering how tricky that stuff is in practise, I'd like to know
> more how it extends to modern circuitry. surely modern hardware must
> be better isolated...
> 

A good question, I'd be curious too.

I understand that at physical scale of modern hardware they actually
have to take quantum phenomena into account. Which is kind of
mind-blowing. I have no idea how much that might relate to gnd
isolation though.

Maybe this just shows my naivety, but I wonder if modern clock speeds
might actually help dealing with gnd isolation. Ie, not enough time for
the signals to bounce enough to cause trouble? I'm probably just
speaking total BS though.