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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Organized and Up-to-date Coding Resources

Olrick Lefebvre

Posts 7
21 Feb 2023 14:13


Hi,
Here is just a brief summary of why I open this topic.
Having reserved a little bit of my time at last, to play with my vampirized A500, I chose to port a flash game.
After reversing the game, some of my first tasks were to find how to convert 256 colors bitmaps to 8/16/32 colors IFF and how to convert 16bits Wav files to 8bits 8SVX.
Then I stumbled upon the code example videos and got surprised how easy it would be to use 16bits audio and 256 colors graphics. It made me realize that's the kind of improvements I would have loved to get 30 years ago. So I decided my little spare time would be best used improving my game coding knowledge first without the hassle of degrading graphics and sound.
Then I started searching vampire coding resources to experiment a little bit and validate this choice.
Well, I've found the dedicated coding pages, with a few simple examples, the 68080 instructions reference and the chipset registers, but I find it a little bit "light" for wanting to code one's first game.

What I miss is an organized wiki in which I could quickly find technical information and simple documented implementation on typical topics. It could be a knowledge base extended by developers who find working solutions to common problems.
What's interesting is that it helps finding quickly relevant information to solve a problem without the hassle of searching among tons of off-topic discussions in the forum or Discord.
As an example, if I want to know what to do with my PC-imported wav file to succeed in playing it with the Vampire, I need to look at relevant and up-to-date articles on that subject. I surely don't want to waste my constrained time reading pointless discussions or asking for the n-th time the same question and upsetting little by little people who waste their own time answering the same question again and again.

I build this kind of knowledge base for my own use with CherryTree while learning low level and game coding, and I guess there are much advanced coders out there who would kindly share their own snippets of knowledge and see it valued by helping other coders.
I guess offering such a resource would help giving a chance to SAGA features rather than just be satisfied with the vampire being considered as a cpu accelerator and RTG board.

The three requirements I see, are:
- hosting a wiki
- managing the wiki, to organize the content and keep searches efficient
- submitting knowledge, based on anyone's kindness

Maybe my suggestion is naive, but if the team decides to publish such a wiki, I'm ready to invest time helping organizing it and possibly contributing.



Tommo Noorduin

Posts 132
21 Feb 2023 20:29


Hello difficult to pronounce member of the community,

Maybe this page is helpfull.
It is what i think would be handy for developers.
EXTERNAL LINK 
Take what you need from that.

I can offer a very simple snippet, it converts a 8/16bit mono/stereo any_ferquentie header from a aiff to the needed saga register values.
The aiff sample data is ready for playback, no convert needed.


Olrick Lefebvre

Posts 7
21 Feb 2023 21:45


Thank you for the link, the page gathers links to relevant material.


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 259
28 Feb 2023 20:01


I propose that you create the wiki put everything that Tommo provided and then people will start adding stuff to it.

Something like that : EXTERNAL LINK


Olrick Lefebvre

Posts 7
09 Mar 2023 21:20


Thank you Kamelito for the link.
I didn't know Wikidot. I'll give it a try.


Olrick Lefebvre

Posts 7
11 Mar 2023 16:58


Hi,
  I started a basic wiki on wikidot and copied Tommo's links to it.
  I also added a link to my ARNE experiment code.
  Tell me if it's going in the right direction.

Edit: maybe better with the link ?
EXTERNAL LINK


Willem Drijver
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 127
12 Mar 2023 12:27


Hi,

Looks already good.

Would be great if you could work with Tommo, Kamelito and others in the #developers channel on Discord to help organise a "Apollo Developer WIKI"

Apollo Team will be glad to adopt this WIKI once it's matured.

Greetings,

Willem Drijver

posts 7