BBC BASIC for the TI-83+/TI-84+ beta release

Wednesday, 21st January 2009

Work commitments have prevented me from doing much on my own projects recently, but zipping up a few files to get BBC BASIC tested is not a time-consuming process so I've started to release test builds.

Download latest version

The documentation is available online. It's generated by a little tool I hacked together to turn a MediaWiki database into a CHM file.

I've had a few issues with the TI-84+ hardware, such as LCD corruption, difficulty in getting key presses to register and crashes when USB devices are unplugged. I think I've fixed the LCD and key issues by dropping the CPU speed down to 6MHz when the full 15MHz is not required, but am still stumped by the USB issues. Unfortunately documentation on the USB hardware is rather thin on the ground and I don't own a TI-84+ for testing.

The package comes with a few demo programs from the CP/M release and a few I cobbled together myself. Most recently I've tried putting together a few little graphics demos.

GFXDEMO.bbc

There's still a fair amount of work to go on this project (especially optimising - some of the code is extremely inefficient) but it feels nice to have something out there for people to try.

C# emu2413

Thursday, 8th January 2009

This is fairly embarrassing; somebody sent me an email that was flagged as spam which I accidentally deleted. So if you sent me an email and I haven't replied, I'm not deliberately being rude; could you send it again?

However, the emulator still crashes when FM sound is enabled. And I have no idea why, as it only happens in Release mode and outside the IDE. The Debug build works fine inside and outside the IDE, and Release mode works fine when run within the IDE.

Controller input updates to Cogwheel

Monday, 5th January 2009

I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year period!

I received an Xbox 360 controller for Christmas, so have done a bit of work on Cogwheel to add support for it. (You can download a copy of the latest version 1.0.2.0 with SlimDX here).

The first issue to deal with was the D-pad on the Xbox 360 controller. When treated as a conventional joystick or DirectInput device the D-pad state is returned via the point-of-view (POV) hat. The joystick input source class couldn't raise events generated by the POV hat so support for that had to be added. This now allows other controllers that used the POV hat for slightly bizarre reasons (eg the faceplate buttons on the PlayStation controller when using PPJoy) to work too.

The second issue was the slightly odd way that the Xbox 360's DirectInput driver returns the state of the triggers - as a single axis, with one trigger moving the axis in one direction, the other trigger moving it in the other. You cannot differentiate between both triggers being held and both being released, as both states return 0. To get around this, I've added support for XInput devices, where all buttons and triggers operate independently.

The Xbox 360 controller now shows up twice in the UI - once as an XInput device and again as a conventional joystick. Fortunately, you can check if a device is an XInput device by the presence of IG_ in its device ID. Here's some C# code that can be used to check with a joystick is an XInput device or not.

using System.Globalization;
using System.Management;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace CogwheelSlimDX.JoystickInput {
    
    /// <summary>
    /// Provides methods for retrieving the state from a joystick.
    /// </summary>
    public class Joystick {

        /* ... */

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the vendor identifier of the <see cref="Joystick"/>.
        /// </summary>
        public ushort VendorId { get; private set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the product identifier of the <see cref="Joystick"/>.
        /// </summary>
        public ushort ProductId { get; private set; }

        /* ... */

        /// <summary>
        /// Determines whether the device is an XInput device or not. Returns true if it is, false if it isn't.
        /// </summary>
        public bool IsXInputDevice {
            get {
                var ParseIds = new Regex(@"([VP])ID_([\da-fA-F]{4})"); // Used to grab the VID/PID components from the device ID string.

                // Iterate over all PNP devices.
                using (var QueryPnp = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"\\.\root\cimv2", string.Format("Select * FROM Win32_PNPEntity"), new EnumerationOptions() { BlockSize = 20 })) {
                    foreach (var PnpDevice in QueryPnp.Get()) {

                        // Check if the DeviceId contains the tell-tale "IG_".
                        var DeviceId = (string)PnpDevice.Properties["DeviceID"].Value;
                        if (DeviceId.Contains("IG_")) {

                            // Check the VID/PID components against the joystick's.
                            var Ids = ParseIds.Matches(DeviceId);
                            if (Ids.Count == 2) {
                                ushort? VId = null, PId = null;
                                foreach (Match M in Ids) {
                                    ushort Value = ushort.Parse(M.Groups[2].Value, NumberStyles.HexNumber);
                                    switch (M.Groups[1].Value) {
                                        case "V": VId = Value; break;
                                        case "P": PId = Value; break;
                                    }
                                }
                                if (VId.HasValue && this.VendorId == VId && PId.HasValue && this.ProductId == PId) return true;
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
                return false;
            }
        }

        /* ... */
    }
}

When the joysticks are enumerated they are only added to the input manager if they are not XInput devices.

You can view/download the code here and it will run in the shareware version of BBC BASIC for Windows. The code has been deliberately uglified (cramming multiple statements onto a single line, few comments, trimmed whitespace) to try and keep it within the shareware version's 8KB limit as this is a good limit to keep in mind for the TI-83+ version too.

Sega Master System emulation in Silverlight

Monday, 15th December 2008

I've had to quickly learn Silverlight for work recently, which has been an interesting experience. I've had to write new code, which is fine but doesn't really excite me as far as Silverlight is concerned - it doesn't really matter which language new code is developed in, as long as it gets the job done.

What does interest me more is that Silverlight is ".NET in your browser", and I'm a big fan of .NET technology with a handful of .NET-based projects under my belt. Silverlight therefore gives me the opportunity to run these projects within the browser, which is a fun idea.

Click to launch emulator in new window.

To this end, I've turned Cogwheel, a Sega 8-bit system emulator, into a Silverlight application. It took about an hour and a half, which was not as bad as I'd expected! (Skip to the bottom for instructions for the demo).

Raster graphics

Silverlight's raster graphics support is somewhat lacking. You can display raster graphics in Image elements, but - as far as I can see - that's about it. If you wish to generate and display images dynamically via primitive pixel-pushing, you're out of luck as far as Silverlight's class library is concerned.

Thankfully, Ian Griffiths has developed a class named PngGenerator that can speedily encode a PNG from an array of Colors that can then be displayed in an Image. Cogwheel's rasteriser returns pixel data as an array of integers so there's a small amount of overhead to convert these but other than that it's easy to push pixels, albeit in a fairly roundabout manner.

Render loop

The render loop is based around an empty Storyboard that invokes an Action every time it completes then restarts itself.

using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;

namespace Cogwheel.Silverlight {

    public static class RenderLoop {

        public static void AttachRenderLoop(this FrameworkElement c, Action update) {
            var Board = new Storyboard();
            c.Resources.Add("RenderLoop", Board);
            Board.Completed += (sender, e) => {
                if (update != null) update();
                Board.Begin();
            };
            Board.Begin();
        }

        public static void DetachRenderLoop(this FrameworkElement c) {
            var Board = (Storyboard)c.Resources["RenderLoop"];
            Board.Stop();
            c.Resources.Remove("RenderLoop");
        }
    
    }
}

I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it, but it works well enough and is easy to use - just grab any FrameworkElement (in my case the Page UserControl) and call AttachRenderLoop:

private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {
    this.UserControlRoot.AttachRenderLoop(() => {
        /* Update/render loop in here. */
    });
}

Missing .NET framework class library features

This is the big one; Silverlight does not cover the entire .NET framework class library, and so bits of it are missing. Fortunately this can be resolved, the difficulty depending on how you want the functionality of the original app to be affected.

Missing types you're not interested in.

These are the easiest to deal with, and this includes attributes and interfaces that the existing code uses that you're not especially interested in. For example, Cogwheel uses some of .NET's serialisation features for save states - a feature I wasn't intending on implementing in the Silverlight version. The [Serializable] and [NonSerialized] attributes are not available in Silverlight, nor is the IDeserializationCallback interface. To get the project to compile some dummy types were created.

namespace System {

    class SerializableAttribute : Attribute { }
    class NonSerializedAttribute : Attribute { }
    
    interface IDeserializationCallback {
        void OnDeserialization(object sender);
    }

}

Missing types or methods that you don't mind partially losing.

Cogwheel features some zip file handling code that uses System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream, a class not available in Silverlight. Rather than remove the zip classes entirely (which would require modifications to other files that relied on them) it was easier to use conditional compilation to skip over the DeflateStream where required.

switch (this.Method) {
    case CompressionMethod.Store:
        CompressingStream = CompressedStream;
        break;
    
    #if !SILVERLIGHT
    case CompressionMethod.Deflate:
        CompressingStream = new DeflateStream(CompressedStream, CompressionMode.Compress, true);
        break;
    #endif
    
    default:
        throw new NotSupportedException();
}

Missing instance methods.

C# 3.0 adds support for extension methods - user-defined methods that can be used to extend the functionality of existing classes that you cannot modify directly. Silverlight is missing a number of instance methods on certain classes, such as string.ToLowerInvariant();. By using extension methods the missing methods can be restored.

namespace System {

    public static class Extensions {
        public static string ToLowerInvariant(this string s) { return s.ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); }
        public static string ToUpperInvariant(this string s) { return s.ToUpper(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); }
    }

}

Missing static methods.

These are the most work to fix as extension methods only work on instance methods, not static methods. This requires a change at the place the method is called as well as the code for the method itself.

I've got around this by creating new static classes with Ex appended to the name then using using to alias the types. For example, Silverlight lacks the Array.ConvertAll method.

namespace System {

    static class ArrayEx {
        public static TOut[] ConvertAll<TIn, TOut>(TIn[] input, Func<TIn, TOut> fn) {
            TOut[] result = new TOut[input.Length];
            for (int i = 0; i < input.Length; i++) {
                result[i] = fn(input[i]);
            }
            return result;
        }
    }

}

First, a replacement method is written with Ex appended to the class name. Secondly, any file that contains a reference to the method has this added to the top:

#if SILVERLIGHT
using ArrayEx = System.ArrayEx;
#else
using System.IO.Compression;
using ArrayEx = System.Array;
#endif

Finally, anywhere in the code that calls Array.ConvertAll is modified to call ArrayEx.ConvertAll instead. When compiling for Silverlight it calls the new routine, otherwise it calls the regular Array.Convert.

Demo

The links below launch the emulator with the selected ROM image.

• Sega Tween (Project page).
• Fire Track (Project page).

To run your own ROM image, click on the folder image in the bottom-right corner of the browser window to bring up a standard open file dialog.

Zip files are not handled correctly, but if you type *.* into the filename box, right-click a zip file, pick Open, then select the ROM from inside that it should work (it does on Vista at any rate).

The cursor keys act as you'd expect; Ctrl or Z is button 1/Start; Alt, Shift or X is 2 (Alt brings up the menu in IE). Space is Pause if you use an SMS ROM and Start if you use a Game Gear ROM. Keys don't work at all in Opera for some reason, but they should work fine in IE 8 and Firefox 3. You may need to click on the application first!

Issues

There are a number of issues I have yet to address. Performance is an obvious one; it's a little choppy even with 100% usage of one the cores on a Core 2 Duo. Sound is missing, and I'm not sure what Opera's doing with keys. Other than that, I thought it was a fun experiment.

Once I've tidied it up a bit I'll merge the source code with the existing source repository.

Virtual screen resolutions for BBC Micro compatibility

Monday, 8th December 2008

The BBC Micro had a virtual resolution of 1280×1024, meaning that if you drew a circle centred on (1280/2,1024/2) it would appear in the middle of the screen regardless of its pixel resolution. On top of that, (0,0) was in the bottom-left hand corner of the screen with the Y axis pointing upwards.

Thus far I'd been using the slightly more intuitive fixed resolution of 96×64 with (0,0) in the top-left hand corner with the Y axis pointing downwards. This means that any graphics program for the TI-83+ version appears upside down and squashed into the bottom-left corner when run on the BBC Micro.

I have worked on attempting to remedy this. 1280×1024 does not divide cleanly into 96×64, so I've used a constant scale factor of 16 on both axes resulting in a virtual resolution of 1536×1024. (Flipping the Y axis is easy enough). This means that programs drawing shapes (lines, circles, triangles, rectangles, parallelograms) will run on both BBC Micro "compatible" versions of BBC BASIC and the TI-83+ and produce roughly the same results.

As this may not be to everyone's tastes the two options may be independently controlled with two new star commands;

• *YAXIS UP|DOWN
• *GSCALE ON|OFF

The default is to have *YAXIS UP and *GSCALE ON. To revert to the old behaviour you could specify *YAXIS DOWN and *GSCALE OFF.

I have also been working on implementing the OS call OSGBPB. This call allows you to read/write multiple bytes of data in one go, so is much faster than using the byte-at-a-time BGET# and BPUT# commands. It also provides a way to enumerate filenames, a feature I have yet to implement but one that should be useful (eg to search for data files for your own program without having the filename hard-coded or having to prompt the user).