Hardware thumbnail generator for task-switcher

One of the main reasons for implementing the hypervisor is so that it will be possible to switch between different tasks running on the machine.  The tasks won't be running at the same time, but rather they will be suspended while another task is running.

For a task-switcher to be nice, it would be really handy to be able to show a low-res screen-shot of the last state of each task so that the user can visually select which one they want.  In other words, to have something that is not too unlike the Windows and OSX window/task switcher interfaces.

However, this is tricky on an 8-bit computer that has no frame buffer, and may be using all sorts of crazy raster effects.

Thus I need some way to have the VIC-IV update a little low-res screen shot, i.e., a thumbnail image, that the hypervisor can read out, and retain for later task-switching calls to show the user what was running in each task before they were suspended.

So I set about implementing a little 4KB thumbnail buffer which is automatically written to by the VIC-IV, and which can be read from the hypervisor.  This resolution allows for 80x50, which should be sufficient to get the idea of what is on a display.  Each pixel is an 8-bit RRRGGGBB colour byte.

Because the VIC-IV writes the thumbnail data directly from the pixel stream, it occurs after palette selection, sprites and all raster effects.  That is, the thumbnails it generates should be "true".

After a bit of fiddling around, it is mostly working.

To test it, I wrote a little BASIC programme that reads from the one-byte access to the 4KB buffer, copying it to $4000-$4FFF.  Then I used the serial monitor to grab that copy of the data, and wrote some UNIX shell scripts and a little C programme to munge it into an 80x50 Windows BMP file.

Here is how it looks, with the image rather enlarged to make it easier to see:

While not perfect, it is an improvement on the first capture, where I forgot to read from the start of the thumbnail buffer, so it was all out of whack:

In need to find out what is causing the "clouds", and also why it is writing only 77 pixels per line instead of 80 pixels per line.

But other than these problems, I am well on the way to being able to present a nice graphical display to allow for switching between tasks from the hypervisor.