06 февраля 2017

                              News
                        by Alone Coder

Winter vacations are over.

John Silver recovered his broken leg and returned to his job. In
our old groupInvaders8 three people broke legs: he, I, and his
brotherBasil. Together with Codex group, we even wrote two gift
demos toBasil because of this, they were released with ZX-Guide
#2.5 Trash. One of the gifts was even labelled"Invalids8 group" 
:)

DimkaM has joined the branches of Unreal Speccy emulator: from
DeathSoft and fromLord Vader. 

NedoPC develops a new version of TurboSoundFM sound card named
TurboFM Pro, with SAA chip added. 

Deathsoft continues to reverse engineer the schematics of
1818VG93 disk controller using microphotographs. 

I continue to develop NedoLang programming language, changing
its syntax again:
- the typecast is now with '+ ' (not in function parameters).
Functions differ from variables by parentheses around
(parentheses after them don't help because the identifiers can
contain a number of words):+(type)(expr) vs.
+(type)funcname(...) vs.+(type)num . 
- function paramenters are no more named:funcname((type)num,
(type)(expr)), (type)funcname(...)) .
- constants appeared:const type varname=num .
- boolean constants are written this way:+TRUE, +FALSE .
- forwarded procedures and functions added (forward is written
before the parenthesized argument list).
- unpaired quotes in comments can be used.
I gradually translate the NedoLang compiler source into NedoLang
(I already translated 3 low-level modules and almost finished
the main module). However I have a feeling that the compiler
will not be used at my job.
NedoAsm is still at the same stage because there isn't loader or 
linker for object files, to theck the output. I'm debugging the
compiler using its error messages and comparing the output to
the output of previous versions.

Hippiman/Conscience has translated his PC game Dizzy Rescues
Santa in English. I corrected the translation. Anybody to port 
DizzyAGE engine to Speccy? 

After a year,Arwald/Conscience continues to develop Rusted
Souls, a text adventure. At the same time he writes his magister 
thesis. I colourized two pictures thatLouisa/Conscience drew in
black and white.

Louisa has photographed two more of my old copy-books. All in
all she photographed around1500 pictures, including all the
other copy-books and papers.

AmoNik finished his IDE driver mentioned in the previous issue.
See it in the supplement.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ 
In 2015 I wrote a driver for iS-DOS to work with CompactFlash
cards, attached to SMUC controller instead of HDD. That driver
only supported CHS addressing.
The driver supported two IDE channels at the same time and
required controller ports to be always open, i.e. IDE controller
in SMUC should be always accessible outside DOS ROM. This
feature is possible in the modern version named SMUC v2.

Later few more versions of the driver were released. The changes
were mostly for adding compatibility with different memory cards
I had.
During the New Year vacations, when everybody were celebrating
around a table (or below), I occupied myself with assembler and
wrote a new driver that supports LBA28 addressing. This driver
became shorter, simpler, faster and more compatible with
different cards.
I wanted to test the new driver with all my CompactFlash cards,
but three of them had various operating systems installed so I
didn't touch them. Four cards didn't work even with Scorpion
shadow monitor, and I couldn't create partitions there. I
skipped them too. One more card appeared so slow that I decided
to leave it too. Its write speed via 3D13 emulation was around 3
KB/s. I tested the remaining five cards for reading and writing
by copying my iS-DOS system partition there, that is 8 MB. After
the writing, I cheched the filesystem for integrity with arzt+
utility in Verify mode, then I tested checksums with ch+2
utility. One of five cards had several errors. I couldn't make
it work well.

Just in case, I made a CHS version based on the latest LBA
version, but I don't plan to support it. I don't see why - all
the modern devices have LBA addressing, and the driver was
written for them first.

The following CompactFlash cards proved well:
Sandisk 32 Mb, Sandisk 64 Mb, Silicon Power 1 Gb 80x, Silicon
Power 2 Gb 200x
Worked with errors:Transcend 1 Gb
Couldn't format:Kingston 1 Gb, Kingston 4 Gb, Lexar
Professional 2 Gb 300x, Sandisk Ultra 2 Gb 1SMb/s
Was slow:A-Data Speedy 1 Gb

See the drivers in the addendum: HDDSMUC(CHS version 1.03)and 
HDDLSMUC(LBA version 1.01). 
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ 

vBv has released his famous collection of ZX Spectrum software
(now with video) in the Internet:

Software, infos, photos:
https://yadi.sk/d/wC8KMdP139XCdc
https://yadi.sk/d/CiG_xY9D39XGUR
https://yadi.sk/d/FUYб2G6039XREL
https://yadi.sk/d/nsjHZGekЗ9XaxK
https://yadi.sk/d/2nkEkob139aZht
https://yadi.sk/d/yPLuhN2y39YuFL
https://yadi.sk/d/OGsXtg2Z39YuFc
https://yadi.sk/d/PTPaSwJЧЗ9WxKu
https://yadi.sk/d/MdalhyqЧЗ9XAed
https://yadi.sk/d/_4-nЗeptЗ9XCHW

Video:
https://yadi.sk/d/ltgHAwl139hkcV
https://yadi.sk/d/rWpdkGM-39g7gh
https://yadi.sk/d/2VCDLF8g39hJHS
https://yadi.sk/d/legUIVEyЗ9n8Q4
https://yadi.sk/d/HgtSaaqmЗ9iSiH
https://yadi.sk/d/VtZocoA139hW5Ч
The latter archive didn't open at AmoNik's, so here are its
contents:
https://yadi.sk/d/ЗDELSbyPЗAHNЧW
https://yadi.sk/d/hSBUU9JPЗAHNf9

vBv has moved from Krasnoyarsk to Sochi keeping his old e-mail.

Using this collection, I wrote a list of Speccy software from
USSR (see the next article). This is the list v0.2. If you know
other programs, please make me know about them!
In addition I also found old articles about history of
ATM-Turbo, not used in Info Guide #11. I added new information 
into one of them and put it here. Another one is yet to be
translated.

FlashZX released the full version of his game DinoRun (based on
easter egg in Chrome, I suppose). The demoversion was shown in
2016.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ 
Hello all! 

This simple game appeared when I tried to write something for 
ZX Evolution, to test gfx, palette etc. 

The game is for ZX Evolution/Baseconf but must work at 
ATM Turbo 2+ too. 

You control a dino running from imminent catastrophe. Your plot 
is to get to a high plateau, where your friends are awaiting you 
and you can be saved... Or, if you select the mode "игра на 
рекорд" (second option), you must run as far as you can to 
collect the record number of points. 
New kinds of opponents appear while game, and the speed 
increases... So everything is like arcade classics. 

Control: up/down cursor keys. 
Additional keys in game: 
"M" - music on/off,
"ENTER" - pause/resume,
"Q" - quit to start menu.

Thanks to all the authors of the materials I used in the game. 
Mostly for music that was written by Andrew Fer, MmcM, SnowMan, 
ByteMan, Mast/Ftl. 
I might forget somebody because everything has changed a hundred 
times... I hope you will excuse me. 
Thanks to Hippiman for his help to master EvoSDK... for code 
snippets etc. Live hints are always better than manuals! 
I also thank the authors of EvoSDK! 

The game: 
https://yadi.sk/d/g7NEN1GPЗ8nAXz

The game with an emulator (run DINORUN.BAT to start the game): 
https://yadi.sk/d/be_Xбm8V38nBzi

Cheat: adds lives. Decide yourself, do you want it :) 
In intro, when "Presents" fully apeared - type "morelives". 
If you could do before the menu, you will hear sound. Afer that, 
you will have 10 lives instead of 30. 

WARNING! - When you run it at ZX Evo, set 14 MHz speed, or the 
samples will play wrong. 
The emulator has a problem with this, and the samples are played 
too fast. Better play on a real machine. 

The game has an ending, so try to complete it faily! 

Anyway, please indulge... Happy New Year again! and... have a 
nice run. 
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘