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V2RetroComputing / analog

∀2 Analog VGA card for the Apple II computer line
MIT License
128 stars 18 forks source link

HGR2 malfunctions. #19

Open TedThompson opened 1 year ago

TedThompson commented 1 year ago

Consider this program:

10 HGR2 : HCOLOR= 5
20 FOR I = 1 TO 199 STEP 3 
30 HPLOT 100,100 TO I,10
40 NEXT

When run without the card installed, it works as expected and remains in memory.

When run with the card installed, the HGR (not HGR2) screen is shown and nothing happens.

Blindly typing TEXT and then LIST reveals the program is gone, as if one had typed NEW.

Apple IIe, enhanced, with 64k 80 col card.

VGA card in slot 3, happens with 80 col firm ware on or off.

TedThompson commented 1 year ago

Just checked and it does NOT happen if the card is in slot 5.

I had thought slot 3 was OK, only limiting access to upload fonts and config settings - neither of which seem to work no matter what slot I am using.

dkgrizzly commented 1 year ago

On the IIe you shouldn't put any card in slot 3 (even this one) with very few exceptions. Can you also inspect the level shifters for shorts? There should not be any problem with soft switches being detected correctly. It may also be worth trying different firmware versions to see if the problem is specific to a certain version. There can be slight timing differences between systems and even batches of the level shifters on the board. I've made adjustments to try and center up the bus sampling to the stable portions and maximize the time the RP2040 has to respond to reads from it's address space. If the config utilities are not working, make sure you are using the latest release package from this project. The google drive folder isn't updated as often and mainly has historical revisions.

TedThompson commented 1 year ago

Well, the issue does not occur if the card is in slot 4.

While I can poke as prescribed and get color changes, fonts don't seem to work via the config utils. I get garbled text like it switches to a font with no lower case letters (Apple ][ style) until I power cycle the computer.

Can you explicitly direct me to firmware and utils to try?

dkgrizzly commented 1 year ago

https://github.com/V2RetroComputing/analog/releases/tag/20230504 is the latest build. it is currently marked as a pre-release since it contains some experimental features regarding color rendering. there is a two-step process when coming from previous builds since the fonts are kept separate to avoid overwriting custom fonts when upgrading to future releases. flash the preloader first, then the actual firmware. The 4ns builds are recommended unless you run into issues with the Pico not booting.

TedThompson commented 1 year ago

Understood, I'll attempt a test in the next few days and report on my findings.