[HN Gopher] Comparing the Graphics Capabilities of the MEGA65 an...
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       Comparing the Graphics Capabilities of the MEGA65 and Amiga
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2023-01-07 12:47 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (c65gs.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (c65gs.blogspot.com)
        
       | unwind wrote:
       | Great article for someone who mostly hears about the MEGA65 and
       | C65 from the sidelines (8-bit Guy etc).
       | 
       | It would have been great with images to illustrate all the
       | various concepts but that is obviously a tall order.
       | 
       | Does anyone have maybe a link to docs?
        
       | timbit42 wrote:
       | A comparison with the C256 Foenix Gen X would also be useful.
        
         | cmrdporcupine wrote:
         | Back when I still had an order in for the Foenix I worked on an
         | emulator (in C++) for a bit. It's likely changed a lot since
         | then -- so take this with a grain of salt -- but it was a lot
         | less "VIC"-like than this and more like a souped-up SVGA. Its
         | framebuffer was structured like an 8-bit indexed palette linear
         | memory. And then she also offered tiling & sprites and she was
         | also working on a blitter at the time.
         | 
         | It was quite nicely and thoughtfully structured though my
         | biggest beef was that writing code for the '816 for managing
         | that framebuffer was a bit of a hassle as you have to fiddle
         | with the bank register to work with pointers into regions
         | bigger than 64k. So let's say you're writing a routine to flood
         | fill or draw lines or rectangles etc, you would, I think, need
         | to be managing the bank register for all framebuffer
         | addressing, which is going to add cycles and complexity.
         | 
         | If I were designing a system around the '816 (or any other
         | processor without a large linear address space) with a large
         | framebuffer like that I'd consider having some planar graphics
         | modes where each plane doesn't exceed 64k in size. Then at
         | least you could do single-colour operations quickly/easily.
         | 
         | And it sounds like the MEGA65's VIC derivative is more 8/16-bit
         | friendly around these kinds of issues.
        
       | Keyframe wrote:
       | I gave up on the machine. I ordered on Oct 1st, 2021.. to this
       | day nothing. Laughable at best. Don't bother if you have an itch.
       | You've been warned.
        
       | diydsp wrote:
       | Impressive info. Might be more digestible in table form.
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | I wish I could use the open ROMs replacement from MEGA65 for
       | VICE, so Hessian (MIT 6502 code and non-free data) could be
       | played under an FSF sanctioned OS.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-08 23:02 UTC)