Sunday, April 14, 2013

AGA/OCS (planar) vs 8BIT CLUT (chunky)

Friday after work, and yester day I did some experimentation, people keep on saying how great AGA and OCS are for demos, is this really true? Does planar really have a advantage over 8bit CLUT chunky graphics. I think it does not, its just that planar modes, makes easier to do layering, and graphic card does the rest, so my experiment was simple implement some sort of layering in 8bit CLUT, should not be too hard.

So here is my main code, not so complicated.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

#include <proto/exec.h>
#include <proto/dos.h>
#include <proto/intuition.h>
#include <proto/graphics.h>
#include <proto/Picasso96API.h>
#include "chunky_plains.h"

int main()
{
    struct chunky_plains *cp;
    struct Screen *src = NULL;
    struct Window *win;
    struct RenderInfo ri;
    int err;
    void *tmp;
    PLANEPTR ptr;
    BPTR bmlock;
    int x,y;
    int n,anim;
    ULONG bpr;

    src = p96OpenScreenTags(
        P96SA_DisplayID, 0x50051000,
        P96SA_Title, (ULONG) "666",
        P96SA_Quiet, TRUE,
        P96SA_NoMemory, TRUE,
        P96SA_NoSprite, TRUE,
        P96SA_Exclusive, TRUE,
        TAG_END    );

    if ( src )
    {
        win = OpenWindowTags(NULL,
            WA_Left, 0, WA_Top, 0,
            WA_Width, 640, WA_Height, 480,
            WA_NoCareRefresh, TRUE,
            WA_Borderless, TRUE,
            WA_Activate, TRUE,
            WA_RMBTrap, TRUE,
            WA_ReportMouse, TRUE,
            WA_CustomScreen, (ULONG) src,
            TAG_END
        );

        if (src)
        {
            SetRGB32( &src -> ViewPort ,0,0xFFFFFFFF,0,0);

            for (y=0;y<255;y++)
            {
                SetRGB32( &src -> ViewPort ,1,y * 0x01010101, (255-y)* 0x01010101,y*0x01010101);
            }

            printf("Bitmap %x\n",src -> BitMap);
            printf("BytesPerRow %d\n", src -> BitMap.BytesPerRow);
            printf("Rows %d\n", src -> BitMap.Rows);

        }
 
        Delay(20);

        if (err = alloc_cunky_plains(win -> RPort -> BitMap, 4,4,0,0,0,0,0,0, 320,200,&cp))
        {
            printf("error code: %d\n",err);
        }
        else
        {

            for (y=0;y<255;y++)
            {
                for (x=0;x<255;x++)
                {
                    set_color(cp,0, (y^x) & 8 ? (x & 3) : (y & 3) , x ,y );
                }
            }
            Delay(100);
            for (anim = 0; anim < 5; anim++)
            for (n=0;n<32;n++)
            {
                for (y=0;y<255;y++)
                {
                    for (x=0;x<255;x++)
                    {
                        set_color(cp,1, (y^(x+n)) & 16 ? 2 : 0 , x ,y );
                    }
                }
                Delay(1);
            }
            Delay(100);

            for (anim = 0; anim < 100; anim++)
            {
                scroll(cp,0,50,50,100,100,0,1);
                scroll(cp,1,50,50,100,100,1,0);
                Delay(2);
            }
            Delay(100);

            free_chunky_plains(cp);
        }
      
        Delay(100);

        CloseWindow(win);
        p96CloseScreen(src);
    }
}


As it turns out its easy to do, I think Intel/AMD PC moved to 16bit/32bit so quickly they forgot about 8Bit/6bit graphics, there are lots of cool things you can do whit 8bit graphics like layering, fadein between layers, scroll texts that go top of some image, or having some kind of vector cube in background and some logo on top of it.

People love this tricks and there are people that do make demos whit this effects even today.

Does it make sens today? Retro is in, but it probably look a lot better in OpenGL, using the Z axes, the things you don't have so great control over in OpenGL is things you can do whit the color palette.

To test you need your own "chunky_plains.h" file, so here is the rest of the code.




struct chunky_plains {
    char bits[8];                    // bits on plain
    char index[8];                    // index bit for color
    char mask[8];                    // mask for color value
    char palette[3][8][256];            // hemm...
    int bytes_per_row;                // copy of bitmap bytes per row
    char *data;                    // ptr to the Bitmap memory
    char *f_buffer;                    // buffer so we can do filtering.
    char *n_buffer;                    // buffer so we can do filtering.
};

enum {
    cp_error_no_mem = 0,
    cp_error_too_many_bits
};

void free_chunky_plains(struct chunky_plains *p)
{
    if (p)
    {
        if (p -> f_buffer) FreeVec(p -> f_buffer);
        if (p -> n_buffer) FreeVec(p -> n_buffer);
        FreeVec(p);
    }
}

int alloc_cunky_plains(struct BitMap *bm, char n0,char n1,char n2,char n3,char n4,char n5, char n6,char n7, int w,int h,struct chunky_plains **new_cp)
{
    struct chunky_plains *p;
    int n;
    int cnt;
    int bpr;
    int error_code = 0;

    p = (struct chunky_plains *) AllocVec( sizeof(struct chunky_plains) , MEMF_ANY );

    if (p)
    {
        bpr = p96GetBitMapAttr(  bm, P96BMA_BYTESPERROW);   

        p -> data =  (char *) p96GetBitMapAttr( bm , P96BMA_MEMORY);
        p -> f_buffer = (char *)  AllocVec( bpr * h , MEMF_ANY | MEMF_CLEAR);
        p -> n_buffer = (char *)  AllocVec( bpr * h , MEMF_ANY | MEMF_CLEAR);
        p -> bytes_per_row = bpr;

        p -> bits[0]=n0;
        p -> bits[1]=n1;
        p -> bits[2]=n2;
        p -> bits[3]=n3;
        p -> bits[4]=n4;
        p -> bits[5]=n5;
        p -> bits[6]=n6;
        p -> bits[7]=n7;

        p -> index[0] = 0;

        cnt = 0;
        for (n=1;n<8;n++)
        {
            p -> index[n] = p -> index[n-1] + p -> bits[n-1];

            cnt += p -> bits[n];
        }

        for (n=0;n<8;n++)
        {
            p -> mask[n] = ((1 << p -> bits[n]) -1) << p -> index[n];

            printf("bits %02x mask %02x index %d\n",p -> bits[n] ,p->mask[n], p -> index[n]);
        }

        if (cnt > 8) error_code = cp_error_too_many_bits;
       
        if (!p -> data)    error_code = cp_error_no_mem;
        if (!p -> f_buffer) error_code = cp_error_no_mem;
        if (!p -> n_buffer) error_code = cp_error_no_mem;

    } else {
        error_code = cp_error_no_mem;
    }

    if (error_code)
    {
        free_chunky_plains(p);
        p = NULL;
    }

    *new_cp = p;

    return error_code;
}


void set_color(struct chunky_plains *cp, char number, char color, int x,int y)
{
    char *pixel = &cp -> data[ x + (cp -> bytes_per_row * y)];
    *pixel = (~cp -> mask[number]) &  *pixel | (color << cp -> index[number] );
}

int get_color(struct chunky_plains *cp, char number, char color, int x,int y)
{
    return (cp -> mask[number] &  cp -> data[ x + (cp -> bytes_per_row * y)]) >> cp -> index[number] ;
}

void scroll(struct chunky_plains *cp, int number, int x1,int y1,int x2,int y2, int offset_x, int offset_y )
{
    int fmask = ~ cp -> mask[number];
    int mask = cp -> mask[number];
    int bytes_per_row = cp -> bytes_per_row;
    register int x = 0;
    register int y;
    register int line_offset;
    register int offset;
    register int doffset;

    // we filter out the other plains into the buffer, so we can put it back in.

    for (y =y1;y<=y2;y++)
    {
        line_offset = y *  bytes_per_row;
        for (x=x1;x<=x2;x++)
        {
            offset = line_offset +x;
            cp -> f_buffer[offset] = cp -> data[ offset ] & fmask;
            cp ->n_buffer[offset] = cp -> data[ offset ] & mask;
        }
    }

    for (y =y1;y<=y2;y++)
    {
        line_offset = y * bytes_per_row;
        for (x=x1;x<=x2;x++)
        {
            offset = line_offset +x;

            doffset = (y + offset_y) * bytes_per_row + (x + offset_x);

            cp -> data[ offset ] = cp -> f_buffer[offset] | cp ->n_buffer[ doffset ] ;
        }
    }
}

Friday, April 5, 2013

The release of excalibur is eminent

The release of Excalibur is eminent


There are only a few features, that I can think of that want, but they going to break some thing maybe, it's time think about uploading a new version, there is 30 changes in this update, so this big update compared to few of the older updates, I lost a lot changes, and head to do most of this twice, nothing makes me more annoyed, well its done.

V1.2.5


* Alpha blended Logo
* Menu divider texture is tiled and scaled up or down to fit.
* Added border to toolbar
* save and load of font settings
* save and load of RGB color options for clock and screens
* some settings has changed name
* toolbar icons, screens and clock is now relative to border
* smarter positioning of toolbar icons
* prefs: added fonts to save routine and gui.
* prefs: added border textures for toolbar.
* prefs: RGB color option for clock and screens.
* Fixed black border texture in GIMP.
* Bjornar made a new logo for me.
* Svenn Ove Hansen, created some experimental textures.
* Fixed bug: droping icons resulted in menu being saved to env, menu divider lost bug.
* Fixed best_height calculation in menu, assumed toolbar to be 60 pixels, that was wrong.
* logo is now sacled down if menu is too small.
* ASync memory bar redraw bug when drooping icons fixed.
* Clip background from window instead of background bitmap bug, fixed.
* Background texture in menu is now aligned whit border top texture, to support DjNick theme.
* DjNick designed a theme
* Fixed DjNick theme, created a icon from textures, and left menu texture, cut of some transparent empty space of right and bottom side of theme,
cropped down menu border textures so it worked on toolbar.
* Fixed up black theme, and bloody theme.
* Fixed check_ext() function checked .info instead of .ext (no major problem unless I like to use it for some thing else)
* disk.info is now ignored.
* font shadow option changed to menu and toolbar instead of global
* max icon size option changed to menu and toolbar instead of global
* prefs program: default setings are now set, before config is loaded.
* GFXMEM can't be 64bit int, due to only 32bit api for memory in OS4, changed to unsigned int32, max 4Gbytes.
* Membar drawen too often, due to refresh bug, added draw_gfx option to membar::Memory() function.


DJNick theme, what happened, well some of changes you see in Mokup are implemented, for example the different size of fonts in menu and toolbar, different icon sizes in menu and toolbar, this things might have not been there if was not for the mockup, what is not implemented is logo on border, and the shadow effect.

What you might not know, is that Excalibur allows for more then one menu, so you can have your music menu, and your games menu, and what ever, just drop your volume or folder on the app/toolbar.


So lets hope I have some time to upload it tomorrow, so you all can enjoy it.

This is Kjetil signing out.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

So how close are we?

So how close are we?


I done lots of work on fine tuning and improving the code, many small visual improvements that I hope will make it easier to make nice looking themes for Excalibur, what we have her is a improved black theme, whit a logo made by Bjørnar, it show some of new features that is important for DjNick mockup.


There are some complaints that is coming from some of you that DjNick mockup is too windows like, but its just a theme, Excalibur is not one form factor, you decide how its going to look how many buttons, what is going to be shown, the idea is that is customizable in looks, so you make look as just as you want (whit in limits of the program).

So what is new, as you can see fonts can be changed in style and size, the menu selector is a transparent bitmap, the menu divider is bitmap tiled or scaled to fit the menu perfect, the program tries to be smart about it, a number of graphic glitches has been fixed, due small disk crash I head to do it twice, so it was almost ready a month ago, but did take me a extra month, due the crash, what is left is going over etch theme and fix and compatibility issues new prefs, some of settings has changed names, so this has to be fixed.

I have long list of ideas in my head, and there are a lot of things that is on the TODO list, but most of graphical stuff is done, might might be effected by changes in other parts of the code, its always a on going processes, where you changes some thing and it effects an other parts, and every thing has be tested.

I also include DjNicks mockup so you can compare.


Saturday, January 26, 2013

Reverse engineering and other stuff.


IRA the dissembler again


Wow, it has started to piss me off, well not rally, what i considered as relative easy thing to do is not as easy as first thought.

The dissembler does good job at generating Assembly code, but does poor job as knowing the different between strings and assembly code, the challenge was not Assembly but cleaning up after a tornado.

What the dissembler generated:

 LAB_0014:
     BVS.S    LAB_001C
     MOVEQ    #117,D2
     BVS.S    LAB_001F
     DC.W    $696f
     BGT.S    LAB_0018
     DC.W    $6c69
     BHI.S    LAB_0020
     BSR.S    LAB_0021
     DC.W    $7900
 LAB_0015:
     BEQ.S    LAB_0022
     BSR.S    LAB_0022
     DC.W    $6869
     DC.W    $6373
     MOVEA.L    26978(A4),A7
     MOVEQ    #97,D1
     MOVEQ    #121,D1

This should be:

LAB_0014_intuition_library:
     DC.b        "intuition.library",0
 LAB_0015_library:
     DC.b        "graphics.library",0

You can see that some thing went wrong when you see DC.w and DC.b mixed whit assembly its not common, maybe if it was a undocumented machine code instruction.

Just to repeat my self, I know some you who read this might not have written assembly so explain it again, DC.b is for arrays of byte and string (array of bytes that has ascii values), DC.w is for 16bit Integer (WORD) of arrays.

“DS” is for size of data and reserves chunk inside your code.

What you really need to use to clean it up a good hex editor, so you can look inside the exe file, and see what text strings should be.

I write a few commands to help me find hex values.

hex_to_string and string_to_hex, it's nice to have if you wonder if some thing really is ASCII and not numbers.

Debugging

 
When debugging code one of my favorite tools is PrintF, simply because debuggers don't work so well under AmigaOS, we have grim repaper that displays power pc registers and 680x0 emulated registers, and where it crashed, but 680x0 code its translated as program runs so its hard to know where it crashed, and also grim only displays crash location as powerpc assembly.

Under UAE there are probably better tools, but I need to find the crashes under AmigaOS4, not under UAE, so not that useful,

 

C vs Assembly language


 Sorry I just don't get it, way are people (Franko) telling me that Assembly is easy language?



This window display C code that does the Dos.library / PrintF command just as Assembly code above.


Well the code lies, I should have opened the DOS.library but its no longer necessary under AmigaOS4, whit -lauto option, so not a big lie, it works as its written.

but as you can see Assembly version of printf takes up to 7 lines to do the same as C does in just ONE single line, and it does the same thing.

And also you can see that strings has to be put some where else, and then you need to move the values in to ARGS array (D2), before command is executed, it just allot of more work.

Well maybe Assembly is not that complicated, but does require a lot more work, in the old days it made sense to do it in Assembly because you needed to optimize for speed as CPU's back then was slow, and you need to optimize for size as storage space was critical, but today it makes no sense to do it unless your optimizing something critical.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Reverse engendering of 680x0 assembly code.

Trying to make sense of it all, IRA the disassembler has been really help full to gives some clues; by providing EQU constants for hardware registers, and some other stuff I don't know what is.


It is worth to point out that any access to hardware registers are illegal under AmigaOS4.1, unless your running on old hardware, so we need to replace it whit system friendly code, so we need to look for any references to this constants, that I have marked, and replace the code.


Next thing that is a issue is to understand what the code does, there are some clues, see the lines that starts whit JSR, JSR is short for Jump To Sub Routine. In front of A6 (address register 6), you have a negative value, this is a offset value we call LVO, A6 is loaded whit library base address, we just need to find what library and compare the LVO values to that library offsets, LVO number are not unique to one library they can be the same for number of libraries, so we can't just auto replace the values whit constants.

Another thing that will help making it possible to understand some thing is to look at bottom of the code, this where you find data, like strings.


DC and DS is defines data space, DC is for values you enter, while DS just reserves chunk of space, it is the DC that we are most interested, in front of DC there is label it represent a reference to the data, the label has been generated by IRA disassembler and not human understandable, we need to replace the label name whit some thing we understand, so we replace LAB_0F71 whit LAB_STERO_LEVEL, and LAB_0F6B whit LAB_VOLUME_BOOST, we do that for all readable strings, we most be careful to replace every reference of LAB_0F6B and LAB_0F71.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Paula sound, so where does that 14bit audio come from?

So where does that 14bit stereo sound come from? You might have wondered, well after reading the hardware reference manual, it explains that 4 audio channels can be combined in to two.

In this mode, one of channels controls the volume (a value from 0 to 63) 6bits, and wave from is (127 to -127) 8bit, so if you add that up 6+8 = 14bit.

This not a hack, that's a urban myth, it was designed to be like this. Its properly more complicated to calculate wave form and volume, and also it does not take advantage of all bits in the audio channels, plus it does need a bit more CPU if I'm not mistaken.

Its a shame they did not provided a proper 16bit D/A converter instead, anyway the sound was not that bad compared some early sound blaster sound cards that sounded a bit sour.


I think this graph illustrates the dilemma, where audio quality is better at lower amplitude, then on higher, as as the amplitude increases, because the 8bits are more compressed at lower volume. So you do not get popper 14bit, where the bits are evenly spread out, what you get if you made a sinus or a sawtooth, you see that top and bottom of sinus are more pixelated then in the center of sinus.

I have also played whit Paula whit some help, few small errors, and this codes players a beep. I have not really found out about interrupts, the DMA is supposed to trigger a interrupt when sound was played, so you fill the buffer whit new sound, but I can't find any interrupt vector to configure in the hardware reference manual.


EXECBASE EQU 4

OldOpenLibrary EQU -$0198
WriteChars EQU -$03AE
CloseLibrary EQU -$019E
Delay EQU -198

ALLOCMEM    EQU -198
FREEMEM        EQU    -210

CUSTOM        EQU    $DFF000
AUD0LCH        EQU    $0A0
AUD0LCL        EQU $0A2
AUD0LEN        EQU $0A4
AUD0VOL        EQU    $0A8
AUD0PER        EQU    $0A6
DMACON        EQU $096

    SECTION MAIN,CODE

MAIN:
        LEA DOS(pc),A1
        MOVE.l #0,D0
        MOVE.l EXECBASE,a6
        jsr     OldOpenLibrary(a6)
        move.l  d0,DOSBASE
        beq.s   .Out

        move.l  #msg_start,d1
        moveq  #9,d2
        JSR .Write

        ; Alloc Sound wave
        MOVE.l #100,D0    ; size
        MOVE.l #2,D1        ; chip mem
        MOVE.l EXECBASE,a6
        JSR ALLOCMEM(a6)
        MOVE.l d0,SINDATA
        BEQ.s    .NOMEM
   
        ; Setup sound wave
        MOVE.L SINDATA,a1
        MOVE.b 0,0(a1)
        MOVE.b 90,1(a1)
        MOVE.b 127,2(a1)
        MOVE.b 90,3(a1)
        MOVE.b 0,4(a1)
        MOVE.b -90,5(a1)
        MOVE.b -127,6(a1)
        MOVE.b -90,7(a1)

        ; Play sound
        LEA.l CUSTOM,a0
        MOVE.l SINDATA,AUD0LCH(a0)  ; sound wave to play
        MOVE.W #4,AUD0LEN(a0) ; length of sound wave
        MOVE.W #64,AUD0VOL(a0) ; sound volume
        MOVE.W #447,AUD0PER(a0) ; set audio period
        ; enable (bit 15) dma (bit 9), audio channel 0 (bit 0)
        MOVE.W #$8201,DMACON(a0)

        ; Wait for sound to be played
        move.l DOSBASE,A6
        move.l #40,D1
        JSR Delay(A6)

        LEA.l CUSTOM,a0
        MOVE.W #1,AUD0VOL(a0) ; sound volume
        MOVE.W #0,AUD0LEN(a0) ; length of sound wave
        MOVE.W #220,AUD0PER(a0) ; set audio period
        MOVE.W #$0001,DMACON(a0)

        move.l  #msg_step,d1
        moveq  #7,d2
        JSR .Write

        ; Wait for sound to be played
        move.l DOSBASE,A6
        move.l #20,D1
        JSR Delay(A6)

        ; Free sound wave
        MOVE.l #100,D0
        MOVE.l SINDATA,a1
        MOVE.l EXECBASE,a6
        JSR FREEMEM(a6)

        move.l  #msg_ok,d1
        moveq  #7,d2
        JSR .Write
        JMP .Out      
.NOMEM:
        move.l  #msg_nomem,d1
        moveq  #13,d2
        JSR .Write
        JMP .Out      
.Write:
        move.l DOSBASE,A6
        jsr     WriteChars(a6)
        RTS
.Out:
        move.l  DOSBASE,a1
        move.l  EXECBASE,a6
        jsr     CloseLibrary(a6)
        RTS
DOS:
        dc.b    "dos.library",0
DOSBASE:
        dc.l 0
SINDATA:
        DC.L    0
msg_start:
        dc.b   "START!!!",$A,0
msg_step
        dc.b    "STEP!!",$A,0
msg_ok:
        dc.b    "OK!!!!",$A,0
msg_nomem:
        dc.b    "AllocMem failed, no memory!",$A,0

Saturday, December 29, 2012

680x0 development enviroment on AmigaOS4.1?

Yesterday I was wondering was, is it possible to setup a 680x0 development enviroment on AmigaOS4.1, whit out depending on UAE.

And the answer is yes.

Well first I tried AsmPRO, while program seams to work, it does give me some DSI crashes some times when I start the program, it did compile my code, but when pressing “j” to run it crashed.

So AsmPRO does not work under AmigaOS4.1, I did not like the integrated text/source code editor anyway.

Next I looked at the vbcc package it has a 680x0 compiler, but it can only produce .o files, so I need vlink once found it, I wrote a tiny AmigaDOS script.


Saved it and added script flag to the file using the protect command in AmgaDOS.
Next I found a "hello world" example using google.



Compiled it, and it worked.

So what is this all about, way do I wont to write 680x0 assembler?

Well the answer to that question is, a question I have been asking my self, what if I disassembled some of old programs that don't work anymore, will I be able fix this programs up?

I have limited experience whit assembler, I did make a 3d routine in inline Assembler in BlitzBasic2 and it worked, (I did it that way because did not have the right books, when I was learning assembler.)