Re: Emulator discrepancies (was DMA'ing in Commodore 64 for developing purposes.)

From: Nejat Dilek <imruon_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2022 02:12:33 +0300
Message-ID: <CAP5r8NSNw+Jb4HnR3y6rMjsfCv3CdMjnVKiJec=+yV7x1MaXKg_at_mail.gmail.com>
For the sake of transferring stuff to run on the C64 DMA is a bit overkill.
Sure if you need to access the memory without cooperation from the running
program it's needed. If you don't need that or if your program would
cooperate then there are simpler solutions. The cart I designed did that
using the serial port on the arduino pro mini board (IRQHack64). You can
then use serial / serial over bluetooth or serial over wireless with an esp
solution to send a program to the C64 to run.
Once I did an ESP8266 port of this cartridge and when I was doing an image
search application I was doing the development like : a batch file builds
on the pc, sends the executable to an ftp server, tells the cartridge to
get it off the ftp site and run. I know it's a bit indirect, cart had both
the web server and web client coded and ready but I was too lazy to code
the client on the pc side and hence used the existing solution of Cart's
web client instead. Even with this approach it was taking just a few
seconds to zap the build to C64.

Here is my search application demonstration (sorry for poor English and
poor presentation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHB8chfId3Q

One guy from the local community pulled the DMA trick with two Atmel micros
by the way, you don't necessarily need a programmable logic chip. Existing
interfaces like sd2iec and similar could also be used if a serial interface
and a reset/boot support were added.  An alternative to DMA would be
interfaces that do memory emulation tricks by using much much faster arm
microcontrollers. One of the cheapest solutions on that front is I guess
Kung Fu flash.

If you don't need fancy features to debug your code, there exist solutions
to easily send your code to C64 to run or at least you can make it easy
with a little bit of effort.

ps: For sd card based solutions one could employ esp8266 acting as a sd
card emulator by the way. I don't know if anyone tried but that would also
be a possibility.
Received on 2022-06-20 02:00:08

Archive generated by hypermail 2.3.0.