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In screen 6 a single sprite can indeed have two colours per line, the value you need to put in the sprite-colour table is 4*Cl + Cr + msn, where Cl is the colour for the left (even) pixels, Cr is the colour for the right (odd) pixels, and msn, the most significant nibble, influences collision detection and contains the early clock bit. My guess is that you forgot the 4*Cl part and that you have just found a bug in your emulator. The simple solution is to multiply the least significant nibble by 5. For bonus points you use extra sprites to make the pointer move in steps of one rather than two pixels.

I'm interested to know if this also happens on openMSX, especially in the latest beta you can find in the openMSX beta testers wanted topic's last post. (I didn't have the time to check with the other devs and I'm on holiday now...)

@NYYRIKKI: Wow, you have a good brain, for me it seems to be ages ago ;-) Do you have an Asm-version for a MSX-DOS program? Wolfgang told me, that I have to make this Bios call...

LD A,%L00000MM ;L=0 don't change turbo LED, MM=mode (0=z80, 1=r800, 2=r800+dram)
CALL #180

...but as the BIOS is not visible in MSX-DOS, how can I reach this function?

@Manuel: Ok, I will try to test it.

Just a quick question, Prodatron, I downloaded the latest and greatest version of Symbos and put it on my newly acquired CF disk, but, whatever I do, like all the previous versions, it works great, except that it persists in wanting to load its control panel's configuration file from my floppy. Even the p parameter doesn't work. Wouldn't it be a nice idea for Symbos to look for an ini file in the same place from where it was started first?

Well, that's a little bit confusing at the moment. SymbOS remembers the drive letter, from which it has been started (in your case from A, as this is your IDE drive I think), and loads the config from this drive after booting. But as in SymbOS A and B are usually floppy drives (like in Windows and on the CPC) and C, D, ... are the IDE drives, it loads/saves the config now from disc. I will have to solve this problem especially for the MSX.

But there is already a way for you to solve it right now: Please copy the config from disc to IDE and boot SymbOS again. As it finds a config on SymbOS-"C:\", it will not switch to the boot-drive-letter. I hope this helps.

Well, that's strange, because while I'm indeed loading symbos.com from a:\symbos\, the floppy is on g, not on c. And even when I assign drive letter c to the first partition, it still defaults to the floppy for loading the file.

BTW I just watched the trailer of King Kong on my VG8235 in 3.5 Mhz. I almost fell off my chair from amazement. This is awesome.

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Well, that's strange, because while I'm indeed loading symbos.com from a:\symbos\, the floppy is on g, not on c. And even when I assign drive letter c to the first partition, it still defaults to the floppy for loading the file.

That's exactly the problem Prodatron is describing. You load from A:\symbos\ then when you are in Symbos A: points to the floppy. So it tries to load the config from A: but the config file isn't on symbos' A: (floppy) drive.

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Well, that's strange, because while I'm indeed loading symbos.com from a:\symbos\, the floppy is on g, not on c. And even when I assign drive letter c to the first partition, it still defaults to the floppy for loading the file. BTW I just watched the trailer of King Kong on my VG8235 in 3.5 Mhz. I almost fell off my chair from amazement. This is awesome.

Did you try to copy the INI file on the CF card? Patsie should be right with your problem.

Well, the videos are nothing against NYYRIKKIs' Dragons Lair demo (I watched it the first time now on a real machine, great! ), as he has sound and should have the double data rate, as he writes the data directly into the vram.
But SymPlay runs in a multitasking environment and uses only OS routines to load the data into a frame buffer and then to display them on the screen - in a window, which even could be overlapped partially by other windows. It's just cool, what our 8Bit Z80 machines are able to do

@Diederick76: I think the videos with the best quality are Matrix2 and CallOnMe. Sometimes it's not easy to convert them. They shouldn't be too dark and need much contrast. Hope that TrebMint will still improve the converter. Great would be an autodetection for contrast and brightness. Because of the current limitation to 4 colours, it's very important, that scenes are not too dark or have not enough contrast, as then you see only 2 colours or so.

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@NYYRIKKI: Wow, you have a good brain, for me it seems to be ages ago ;-) Do you have an Asm-version for a MSX-DOS program? Wolfgang told me, that I have to make this Bios call... LD A,%L00000MM ;L=0 don't change turbo LED, MM=mode (0=z80, 1=r800, 2=r800+dram) CALL #180 ...but as the BIOS is not visible in MSX-DOS, how can I reach this function?

The inter-slot call ($1C) is available. Check your bios docs for more info.

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@Diederick76: I think the videos with the best quality are Matrix2 and CallOnMe. Sometimes it's not easy to convert them. They shouldn't be too dark and need much contrast. Hope that TrebMint will still improve the converter. Great would be an autodetection for contrast and brightness. Because of the current limitation to 4 colours, it's very important, that scenes are not too dark or have not enough contrast, as then you see only 2 colours or so.

I am currently working on the video suite, so these issues will all be dealt with shortly. Its become more like a proper editing tool rather than what it was, mainly so I can mix clips, and perhaps transitions, filters, subtitles, looping, chip music etc. Plus this also means I can add key controls so we can create Dragon Lair type games easily (well as long as prodatron can add them to the player). Not forgetting cpc and msx output rather than converting. It also has 16 colour output even though symbos doesn't support such modes yet. Will Mode 5, and Mode 7 happen for symbos?

I'm actually wondering if this might be useful for frontends of games etc, bit like a dvd menu maker.

As for audio, I don't know whether prodatron thinks it feasible given the bandwidth. It not easy also given that I'm using blitz for symstudio, but I guess there is a solution to that also.

Rob

Hey, cool!
When I have finished all most important things for the MSX port, I will start with Screen 7/16 colour support. If it's very slow, I will also implement Screen 5 support.
If SymStudio could also become a "DVD maker" that would be very interesting
Regarding the sound: In SymbOS it's impossible to implement PSG/PCM output, as you need an exact timing + own "hacked" IDE loader, which is impossible in the multitasking environment. What will be possible, is outputting sound on a soundcard, which includes a buffer. Maybe we can do this with the wavetable-ram of the Moonsound. On the CPC there is currently a MP3 card in development, which has its own buffer, too.

About the Moonsound: unfortunately you cannot write to the RAM and play at the same time... It's the only really annyoing limitation of it... (But I'm not sure this is a relevant remark here.)

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@Arnold: That's it! This wasn't mentioned in the portar document, and BlueMSX seems to have a wrong behaviour here (@dvik: could this be?). Thank you!

@Prodatron: I just checked and it is indeed a bug in the emulator. I'll fix this asap. Let me know if you need a new beta.

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@NYYRIKKI: Wow, you have a good brain, for me it seems to be ages ago ;-) Do you have an Asm-version for a MSX-DOS program? Wolfgang told me, that I have to make this Bios call... LD A,%L00000MM ;L=0 don't change turbo LED, MM=mode (0=z80, 1=r800, 2=r800+dram) CALL #180 ...but as the BIOS is not visible in MSX-DOS, how can I reach this function?

You can use the CALLF function by using RST #30 like this:

	LD A,%L00000MM ;L=0 don't change turbo LED, MM=mode (0=z80, 1=r800, 2=r800+dram)
	RST #30
	DB #80	;Slot id (%L000SSMM)
		;L  = Use subslot information = 1
		;SS = Sub Slot
		;MM = Main slot
	DW #180	;Address to jump to

	RET

... This works in BASIC and DOS.

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Hey, cool! When I have finished all most important things for the MSX port, I will start with Screen 7/16 colour support. If it's very slow, I will also implement Screen 5 support.

Prodatron, screen7 may be too slow (olny logical operations are equally faster on all modes), think about screen5.