The cover slide was produced using a PNG to MEGA65 full-colour image converstion utility I wrote, and the main slides using MegaWAT, which I wrote with Lucas, a student, over the past few months in preparation for this, and in general, for being able to use the MEGA65 to introduce itself. The source is at github.com/MEGA65/MegaWAT.
Making a C64/C65 compatible computer
Thursday, 24 January 2019
The MEGA65 at Linux Conf AU
The cover slide was produced using a PNG to MEGA65 full-colour image converstion utility I wrote, and the main slides using MegaWAT, which I wrote with Lucas, a student, over the past few months in preparation for this, and in general, for being able to use the MEGA65 to introduce itself. The source is at github.com/MEGA65/MegaWAT.
Thursday, 17 January 2019
Livening CPU speed, video mode and monitor in freeze menu
Continuing the work on the freeze menu, I have been able to make quite a bit of progress lately. In the last post, I had the freezer and freeze menu working in a minimalistic kind of way. However, there were a lot of things not there, and still plenty of bugs to cause trouble.
For a start, I wasn't saving the state of the CIAs. This turned out to be a bit more of a pain than I first expected. Fortunately, I was able to read through the information on C64 freezing by Gideon, as well as get a bunch of useful tips from Groepaz and others. This opened a whole can of worms, and basically reminded me of a fact I had either previously forgotten, or had failed to fully grasp: Perfect freezing is practically impossible, and requires in the very least hardware support if you are to have any chance at getting it right.
The CIAs are a big part of the reason behind this. The problem is that the CIAs have timers that keep on running while you are trying to freeze them, and there is certain internal state that you can't read from the registers, but requires that you try to work out how far the timers have run down, wait for them to run out, and then read out the latched information. Of course, one or more of the four timers of the 2 CIAs will probably run out before you spot it, and the accuracy you can achieve when trying to watch four timers with a single 1MHz CPU is rather limited -- probably of the order of 50 or 100 cycles.
My solution to deal with the CIAs was to make the CIAs effectively freeze themselves when in Hypervisor mode: The CIA timers stop ticking, and acknowledging interrupts via $DC0D etc has no effect. I also added 16 extra registers in hypervisor mode of the CIA that allows us to directly read out the latched and current values of the timers, as well as the current and alarm times of the time-of-day clocks. It is still not perfect, but it pretty much works.
As I worked on the freeze menu, I wanted to provide an indication of which ROM you are running, since there are a variety of C65 ROMs available, and people will probably want to try some out. So I wrote a little routine that makes an educated guess as to which ROM you are running. For the C65 ROMs, this is quite simple: they have a fairly reliable version string near the start of the ROM, and so if I find one of those, I indicate it is a C65 ROM and show the relevant version. It can also detect a wide range of C64 and even PET 4064 ROMs. I did this by making a utility that reads in all the ROMs I could find, and looks for unique bytes in the KERNAL ROM part, and makes its decision on that basis. It turns out if you do the tests in the right order, a single PEEK is all you need to test for each known ROM:
// Check for C65 ROM via version string
if ((freeze_peek(0x20016L)=='V')
&&(freeze_peek(0x20017L)=='9')) {
c65_rom_name[0]=' ';
c65_rom_name[1]='C';
c65_rom_name[2]='6';
c65_rom_name[3]='5';
c65_rom_name[4]=' ';
for(i=0;i<6;i++)
c65_rom_name[5+i]=freeze_peek(0x20017L+i);
c65_rom_name[11]=0;
return c65_rom_name;
}
if (freeze_peek(0x2e47dL)=='J') {
// Probably jiffy dos
if (freeze_peek(0x2e535L)==0x06)
return "sx64 jiffy ";
else
return "c64 jiffy ";
}
// Else guess using detection routines from detect_roms.c
// These were built using a combination of the ROMs from zimmers.net/pub/c64/firmware,
// the RetroReplay ROM collection, and the JiffyDOS ROMs
if (freeze_peek(0x2e449L)==0x2e) return "C64GS ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e119L)==0xc9) return "C64 REV1 ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e67dL)==0xb0) return "C64 REV2 JP";
if (freeze_peek(0x2ebaeL)==0x5b) return "C64 REV3 DK";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e0efL)==0x28) return "C64 SCAND ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2ebf3L)==0x40) return "C64 SWEDEN ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e461L)==0x20) return "CYCLONE 1.0";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e4a4L)==0x41) return "DOLPHIN 1.0";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e47fL)==0x52) return "DOLPHIN 2AU";
if (freeze_peek(0x2eed7L)==0x2c) return "DOLPHIN 2P1";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e7d2L)==0x6b) return "DOLPHIN 2P2";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e4a6L)==0x32) return "DOLPHIN 2P3";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e0f9L)==0xaa) return "DOLPHIN 3.0";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e462L)==0x45) return "DOSROM V1.2";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e472L)==0x20) return "MERCRY3 PAL";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e16dL)==0x84) return "MERCRY NTSC";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e42dL)==0x4c) return "PET 4064 ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e1d9L)==0xa6) return "SX64 CROACH";
if (freeze_peek(0x2eba9L)==0x2d) return "SX64 SCAND ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e476L)==0x2a) return "TRBOACS 2.6";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e535L)==0x07) return "TRBOACS 3P1";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e176L)==0x8d) return "TRBOASC 3P2";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e42aL)==0x72) return "TRBOPROC US";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e4acL)==0x81) return "C64C 251913";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e479L)==0x2a) return "C64 REV2 ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e535L)==0x06) return "SX64 REV4 ";
return "UNKNOWN ROM";
This routine is written in C, because the whole freeze menu is written in C using the CC65 compiler. This makes it quite easy to change, which is how we want it: If you want to make your own replacement or modified freeze menu, then it should be possible to do. We are progressively building up a library of functions that are helpful, such as the freeze_peek() routine, which the freezer uses to retrieve a byte of memory from the frozen program. To do this, it needs to know the layout of the freeze slots as they are saved on the SD card, because on the MEGA65 freezing always happens with the result written to the SD card, rather than being squished around in memory like with the original freeze cartridges. The freeze_peek() routine itself is fairly simple, basically consisting of working out where the byte lives on the SD card, then reading the relevant sector, and returning the appropriate byte of data:
unsigned char freeze_peek(uint32_t addr)
{
// Find sector
uint32_t freeze_slot_offset=address_to_freeze_slot_offset(addr);
unsigned short offset;
offset=freeze_slot_offset&0x1ff;
freeze_slot_offset=freeze_slot_offset>>9L;
if (freeze_slot_offset==0xFFFFFFFFL) {
// Invalid / unfrozen memory
return 0x55;
}
// Read the sector
sdcard_readsector(freeze_slot_start_sector+freeze_slot_offset);
// Return the byte
return sector_buffer[offset&0x1ff];
}
Working out where the byte lives is a little more complicated, as we have to ask the Hypervisor for the layout of the freeze regions, and then iterate through those regions to work out if the requested address falls in one of those regions. It is possible that it doesn't, because the MEGA65 has a lot more address space (256MB) than it has populated with actual memory.
/* Convert a requested address to a location in the freeze slot,
or to 0xFFFFFFFF if the address is not present.
*/
uint32_t address_to_freeze_slot_offset(uint32_t address)
{
uint32_t freeze_slot_offset=1; // Skip the initial saved SD sector at the beginning of each slot
uint32_t relative_address=0;
uint32_t region_length=0;
char skip,i;
for(i=0;i<freeze_region_count;i++) {
skip=0;
if (address<freeze_region_list[i].address_base) skip=1;
relative_address=address-freeze_region_list[i].address_base;
if (freeze_region_list[i].address_base==0x1000L) {
// Thumbnail region: Treat specially so that we can examine it
// We give the fictional mapping of $FF54xxx
if ((address&0xFFFF000L)==0xFF54000L)
{ relative_address=address&0xFFF;
freeze_slot_offset=freeze_slot_offset<<9;
freeze_slot_offset+=(relative_address&0xFFF);
return freeze_slot_offset;
}
}
region_length=freeze_region_list[i].region_length®ION_LENGTH_MASK;
if (relative_address>=region_length) skip=1;
if (skip) {
// Skip this region if our address is not in it
freeze_slot_offset+=region_length>>9;
// If region is not an integer number of sectors long, don't forget to count the partial sector
if (region_length&0x1ff) freeze_slot_offset++;
} else {
// The address is in this region.
// Firsts add the number of sectors to get to the one with the content we want
freeze_slot_offset+=relative_address>>9;
// Now multiply it by the length of a sector (512 bytes), and add the offset in the sector
// This gives us the absolute byte position in the slot of the address we want.
freeze_slot_offset=freeze_slot_offset<<9;
freeze_slot_offset+=(relative_address&0x1FF);
return freeze_slot_offset;
}
}
return 0xFFFFFFFFL;
}
Anyway, back to the ROM auto-detection: The result of the ROM auto-detection is displayed in the freeze menu, as shown in this screenshot:
While we are here, let's walk through the various elements, starting with most obvious part: the picture of the computer itself! Here the results of the ROM auto-detection are used a second time, to pick the correct surround to show around the thumbnail image of the frozen program: If it is a C65 ROM, you see a C65 and 1084S monitor depicted, otherwise a C64 and 1702:
These surrounding images can be drawn as a 152x96 pixel PNG file, and converted to the correct format using the thumbnail-surround-formatter from thte MEGA65 Freeze Menu repository, so if you want to make it look different, perhaps like Gus the snail, you are totally free to do so! The only limitation is that the screen position for the thumbnail is fixed, and the colour palette is a 256 colour colour cube, with the first 16 entries replaced by the C64's standard palette. I might do something to improve the palette at some point, because it is a bit annoying. It might be possible, for example, to have a separate palette for the surrounding image versus the thumbnail by selecting the alternate palette bit in the thumbnail graphics tiles. But that will have to wait for another day.
The thumbnails are 80x50 images generated automatically by the MEGA65 hardware, exactly for the freeze menu. I wrote about the thumbnail generator hardware a long time ago, and it has finally taken until now before it got to be used for its intended purpose. The only real change to the thumbnail generator was to move it to $D640 instead of $D630 to avoid a recurring address resolution problem in the VHDL, which I think was due to glitching of the chip select line.
While on the one hand just a bit of a fun cosmetic touch, the thumbnails serve the very useful purpose of making it easier for you to find previously frozen programs. From in the freeze menu you can use the cursor keys to navigate through the set of freeze slots configured in the MEGA65 system partition. The MEGA65 FDISK+FORMAT utility will normally allocate upto 2GB for the systesm partition, with about half of that being freeze slots, giving a total of just over 2,000 freeze slots under the current design.
That should be more than enough to have games and programs you like to use pre-frozen ready for an instant meal whenever you want! It also means if you need to interrupt a favourite game at a critical point, it should be easy enough to find a free slot and save it for reheating later. In fact, with ~2,000 slots, searching through them linearly will be sure to become a chore, so I will add some kind of search facility in the future. This is a great thing about writing the freeze menu as a separate program in C, is that it is pretty easy to work on and extend.
Going further through the freeze menu, we find the bank of six quite configuration settings: CPU mode, ROM, CPU Frequency (speed), write-protection of the ROM area, cartridge enable/disable and PAL/NTSC select. With each off these, the setting can be changed by pressing the indicated letter on the screen. The only exception is R for ROM selection, which is not yet implemented.
Below that we have a set of typical Freeze utilities: A monitor to inspect and modify the memory of a frozen program, a mechanism to enter poke codes, e.g., for game cheats, a disk image chooser to let you switch disks while running a program (or to get ready to run one), a sprite viewer, poke finder and sprite collision killer (also for cheating in gamems). At the moment only the monitor and disk select options are implemented.
The monitor uses 80-column mode, and works like your typical machine code monitor on the C64. At the moment only M to inspect memory and S to set contents of memory are supported. The syntax of these mirrors that of the MEGA65's hardware monitor, except that with the S command you can use " and ' to indicate either ASCII strings or screen poke codes. So for example S400 'HELLO would put the word HELLO at the top left of the screen in C64 mode, by writing $08 $05 $0C $0C $0F to locations $0400 - $0404.
The disk selector scans the SD card for D81 files, and then displays a list of up to 1,000 of them, and lets you choose one to use. Again, at some point I will add some kind of sorting and/or searching function to make browsing through long lists of disk images easier. But what I have already implemented, is that if you highlight a disk image, and then don't press any keys for a second or more, it will retrieve the directory from the disk image. In this way you can more easily find the disk you are looking for. Here is an example of this in action:
This menu will also refuse to let you select a disk image if it can't be mounted for some reason. The most common cause at the moment is if the .D81 file is fragmented on the SD card. The reason this isn't allowed is that the hardware support for D81 image access requires the D81 file to exist as a single linear 800KB block, so as to avoid the hardware needing to know about FAT file systems. What I will likely do at some point is add support for automatically de-fragmenting image files, so that the user doesn't need to think about it.
Talking about disk images, whenever you load a frozen program, it goes through the disk image attachment process again, so if you have changed the disk image, e.g., by creating a new file in a different session, then they will show up. There are some hazards with this, for example, if the frozen program isn't clever enough to notice the disk-change line, but this will hopefully not be a big problem. Also, of course you could have deleted the disk image. In that case, when you resume the frozen program there will be no disk image attached.
That's the bulk of the function of the freeze menu for now. I have skipped over a whole pile of little niggly problems I have had to solve along the way, and there are still a number of bugs and missing features to be solved, and the freeze/unfreeze process still sometimes messes up the frozen program in some way causing it to crash, but it is already functional enough to be very useful. In short, you can now easily use the MEGA65, including switching disks, CPU speed and other things, without having to do anything awkward. The following video shows me using the freeze menu to do various things. I particularly like how cute the little thumbnails of the frozen programs look :)
For a start, I wasn't saving the state of the CIAs. This turned out to be a bit more of a pain than I first expected. Fortunately, I was able to read through the information on C64 freezing by Gideon, as well as get a bunch of useful tips from Groepaz and others. This opened a whole can of worms, and basically reminded me of a fact I had either previously forgotten, or had failed to fully grasp: Perfect freezing is practically impossible, and requires in the very least hardware support if you are to have any chance at getting it right.
The CIAs are a big part of the reason behind this. The problem is that the CIAs have timers that keep on running while you are trying to freeze them, and there is certain internal state that you can't read from the registers, but requires that you try to work out how far the timers have run down, wait for them to run out, and then read out the latched information. Of course, one or more of the four timers of the 2 CIAs will probably run out before you spot it, and the accuracy you can achieve when trying to watch four timers with a single 1MHz CPU is rather limited -- probably of the order of 50 or 100 cycles.
My solution to deal with the CIAs was to make the CIAs effectively freeze themselves when in Hypervisor mode: The CIA timers stop ticking, and acknowledging interrupts via $DC0D etc has no effect. I also added 16 extra registers in hypervisor mode of the CIA that allows us to directly read out the latched and current values of the timers, as well as the current and alarm times of the time-of-day clocks. It is still not perfect, but it pretty much works.
As I worked on the freeze menu, I wanted to provide an indication of which ROM you are running, since there are a variety of C65 ROMs available, and people will probably want to try some out. So I wrote a little routine that makes an educated guess as to which ROM you are running. For the C65 ROMs, this is quite simple: they have a fairly reliable version string near the start of the ROM, and so if I find one of those, I indicate it is a C65 ROM and show the relevant version. It can also detect a wide range of C64 and even PET 4064 ROMs. I did this by making a utility that reads in all the ROMs I could find, and looks for unique bytes in the KERNAL ROM part, and makes its decision on that basis. It turns out if you do the tests in the right order, a single PEEK is all you need to test for each known ROM:
// Check for C65 ROM via version string
if ((freeze_peek(0x20016L)=='V')
&&(freeze_peek(0x20017L)=='9')) {
c65_rom_name[0]=' ';
c65_rom_name[1]='C';
c65_rom_name[2]='6';
c65_rom_name[3]='5';
c65_rom_name[4]=' ';
for(i=0;i<6;i++)
c65_rom_name[5+i]=freeze_peek(0x20017L+i);
c65_rom_name[11]=0;
return c65_rom_name;
}
if (freeze_peek(0x2e47dL)=='J') {
// Probably jiffy dos
if (freeze_peek(0x2e535L)==0x06)
return "sx64 jiffy ";
else
return "c64 jiffy ";
}
// Else guess using detection routines from detect_roms.c
// These were built using a combination of the ROMs from zimmers.net/pub/c64/firmware,
// the RetroReplay ROM collection, and the JiffyDOS ROMs
if (freeze_peek(0x2e449L)==0x2e) return "C64GS ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e119L)==0xc9) return "C64 REV1 ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e67dL)==0xb0) return "C64 REV2 JP";
if (freeze_peek(0x2ebaeL)==0x5b) return "C64 REV3 DK";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e0efL)==0x28) return "C64 SCAND ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2ebf3L)==0x40) return "C64 SWEDEN ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e461L)==0x20) return "CYCLONE 1.0";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e4a4L)==0x41) return "DOLPHIN 1.0";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e47fL)==0x52) return "DOLPHIN 2AU";
if (freeze_peek(0x2eed7L)==0x2c) return "DOLPHIN 2P1";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e7d2L)==0x6b) return "DOLPHIN 2P2";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e4a6L)==0x32) return "DOLPHIN 2P3";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e0f9L)==0xaa) return "DOLPHIN 3.0";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e462L)==0x45) return "DOSROM V1.2";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e472L)==0x20) return "MERCRY3 PAL";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e16dL)==0x84) return "MERCRY NTSC";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e42dL)==0x4c) return "PET 4064 ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e1d9L)==0xa6) return "SX64 CROACH";
if (freeze_peek(0x2eba9L)==0x2d) return "SX64 SCAND ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e476L)==0x2a) return "TRBOACS 2.6";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e535L)==0x07) return "TRBOACS 3P1";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e176L)==0x8d) return "TRBOASC 3P2";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e42aL)==0x72) return "TRBOPROC US";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e4acL)==0x81) return "C64C 251913";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e479L)==0x2a) return "C64 REV2 ";
if (freeze_peek(0x2e535L)==0x06) return "SX64 REV4 ";
return "UNKNOWN ROM";
This routine is written in C, because the whole freeze menu is written in C using the CC65 compiler. This makes it quite easy to change, which is how we want it: If you want to make your own replacement or modified freeze menu, then it should be possible to do. We are progressively building up a library of functions that are helpful, such as the freeze_peek() routine, which the freezer uses to retrieve a byte of memory from the frozen program. To do this, it needs to know the layout of the freeze slots as they are saved on the SD card, because on the MEGA65 freezing always happens with the result written to the SD card, rather than being squished around in memory like with the original freeze cartridges. The freeze_peek() routine itself is fairly simple, basically consisting of working out where the byte lives on the SD card, then reading the relevant sector, and returning the appropriate byte of data:
unsigned char freeze_peek(uint32_t addr)
{
// Find sector
uint32_t freeze_slot_offset=address_to_freeze_slot_offset(addr);
unsigned short offset;
offset=freeze_slot_offset&0x1ff;
freeze_slot_offset=freeze_slot_offset>>9L;
if (freeze_slot_offset==0xFFFFFFFFL) {
// Invalid / unfrozen memory
return 0x55;
}
// Read the sector
sdcard_readsector(freeze_slot_start_sector+freeze_slot_offset);
// Return the byte
return sector_buffer[offset&0x1ff];
}
Working out where the byte lives is a little more complicated, as we have to ask the Hypervisor for the layout of the freeze regions, and then iterate through those regions to work out if the requested address falls in one of those regions. It is possible that it doesn't, because the MEGA65 has a lot more address space (256MB) than it has populated with actual memory.
/* Convert a requested address to a location in the freeze slot,
or to 0xFFFFFFFF if the address is not present.
*/
uint32_t address_to_freeze_slot_offset(uint32_t address)
{
uint32_t freeze_slot_offset=1; // Skip the initial saved SD sector at the beginning of each slot
uint32_t relative_address=0;
uint32_t region_length=0;
char skip,i;
for(i=0;i<freeze_region_count;i++) {
skip=0;
if (address<freeze_region_list[i].address_base) skip=1;
relative_address=address-freeze_region_list[i].address_base;
if (freeze_region_list[i].address_base==0x1000L) {
// Thumbnail region: Treat specially so that we can examine it
// We give the fictional mapping of $FF54xxx
if ((address&0xFFFF000L)==0xFF54000L)
{ relative_address=address&0xFFF;
freeze_slot_offset=freeze_slot_offset<<9;
freeze_slot_offset+=(relative_address&0xFFF);
return freeze_slot_offset;
}
}
region_length=freeze_region_list[i].region_length®ION_LENGTH_MASK;
if (relative_address>=region_length) skip=1;
if (skip) {
// Skip this region if our address is not in it
freeze_slot_offset+=region_length>>9;
// If region is not an integer number of sectors long, don't forget to count the partial sector
if (region_length&0x1ff) freeze_slot_offset++;
} else {
// The address is in this region.
// Firsts add the number of sectors to get to the one with the content we want
freeze_slot_offset+=relative_address>>9;
// Now multiply it by the length of a sector (512 bytes), and add the offset in the sector
// This gives us the absolute byte position in the slot of the address we want.
freeze_slot_offset=freeze_slot_offset<<9;
freeze_slot_offset+=(relative_address&0x1FF);
return freeze_slot_offset;
}
}
return 0xFFFFFFFFL;
}
Anyway, back to the ROM auto-detection: The result of the ROM auto-detection is displayed in the freeze menu, as shown in this screenshot:
While we are here, let's walk through the various elements, starting with most obvious part: the picture of the computer itself! Here the results of the ROM auto-detection are used a second time, to pick the correct surround to show around the thumbnail image of the frozen program: If it is a C65 ROM, you see a C65 and 1084S monitor depicted, otherwise a C64 and 1702:
These surrounding images can be drawn as a 152x96 pixel PNG file, and converted to the correct format using the thumbnail-surround-formatter from thte MEGA65 Freeze Menu repository, so if you want to make it look different, perhaps like Gus the snail, you are totally free to do so! The only limitation is that the screen position for the thumbnail is fixed, and the colour palette is a 256 colour colour cube, with the first 16 entries replaced by the C64's standard palette. I might do something to improve the palette at some point, because it is a bit annoying. It might be possible, for example, to have a separate palette for the surrounding image versus the thumbnail by selecting the alternate palette bit in the thumbnail graphics tiles. But that will have to wait for another day.
The thumbnails are 80x50 images generated automatically by the MEGA65 hardware, exactly for the freeze menu. I wrote about the thumbnail generator hardware a long time ago, and it has finally taken until now before it got to be used for its intended purpose. The only real change to the thumbnail generator was to move it to $D640 instead of $D630 to avoid a recurring address resolution problem in the VHDL, which I think was due to glitching of the chip select line.
While on the one hand just a bit of a fun cosmetic touch, the thumbnails serve the very useful purpose of making it easier for you to find previously frozen programs. From in the freeze menu you can use the cursor keys to navigate through the set of freeze slots configured in the MEGA65 system partition. The MEGA65 FDISK+FORMAT utility will normally allocate upto 2GB for the systesm partition, with about half of that being freeze slots, giving a total of just over 2,000 freeze slots under the current design.
That should be more than enough to have games and programs you like to use pre-frozen ready for an instant meal whenever you want! It also means if you need to interrupt a favourite game at a critical point, it should be easy enough to find a free slot and save it for reheating later. In fact, with ~2,000 slots, searching through them linearly will be sure to become a chore, so I will add some kind of search facility in the future. This is a great thing about writing the freeze menu as a separate program in C, is that it is pretty easy to work on and extend.
Going further through the freeze menu, we find the bank of six quite configuration settings: CPU mode, ROM, CPU Frequency (speed), write-protection of the ROM area, cartridge enable/disable and PAL/NTSC select. With each off these, the setting can be changed by pressing the indicated letter on the screen. The only exception is R for ROM selection, which is not yet implemented.
Below that we have a set of typical Freeze utilities: A monitor to inspect and modify the memory of a frozen program, a mechanism to enter poke codes, e.g., for game cheats, a disk image chooser to let you switch disks while running a program (or to get ready to run one), a sprite viewer, poke finder and sprite collision killer (also for cheating in gamems). At the moment only the monitor and disk select options are implemented.
The monitor uses 80-column mode, and works like your typical machine code monitor on the C64. At the moment only M to inspect memory and S to set contents of memory are supported. The syntax of these mirrors that of the MEGA65's hardware monitor, except that with the S command you can use " and ' to indicate either ASCII strings or screen poke codes. So for example S400 'HELLO would put the word HELLO at the top left of the screen in C64 mode, by writing $08 $05 $0C $0C $0F to locations $0400 - $0404.
The disk selector scans the SD card for D81 files, and then displays a list of up to 1,000 of them, and lets you choose one to use. Again, at some point I will add some kind of sorting and/or searching function to make browsing through long lists of disk images easier. But what I have already implemented, is that if you highlight a disk image, and then don't press any keys for a second or more, it will retrieve the directory from the disk image. In this way you can more easily find the disk you are looking for. Here is an example of this in action:
Talking about disk images, whenever you load a frozen program, it goes through the disk image attachment process again, so if you have changed the disk image, e.g., by creating a new file in a different session, then they will show up. There are some hazards with this, for example, if the frozen program isn't clever enough to notice the disk-change line, but this will hopefully not be a big problem. Also, of course you could have deleted the disk image. In that case, when you resume the frozen program there will be no disk image attached.
That's the bulk of the function of the freeze menu for now. I have skipped over a whole pile of little niggly problems I have had to solve along the way, and there are still a number of bugs and missing features to be solved, and the freeze/unfreeze process still sometimes messes up the frozen program in some way causing it to crash, but it is already functional enough to be very useful. In short, you can now easily use the MEGA65, including switching disks, CPU speed and other things, without having to do anything awkward. The following video shows me using the freeze menu to do various things. I particularly like how cute the little thumbnails of the frozen programs look :)
Thursday, 3 January 2019
More work on the MEGA65 built-in freezer
Yesterday I posted the progress on the built-in freezer for the MEGA65, and explained a bit how it works. However, at that point in time, the freezer was not really functional -- it could save and restore some memory and IO registers, but not without problems, and thus it wasn't possible to actually resume a program after freezing. That has changed today! After quite a bit of fiddling, the freeze and unfreeze routines are now much better, and generally work.
The main progress is that I am able to save the main memory, the colour RAM, the VIC-IV registers (including the colour palettes), the MEGA65 Hypervisor saved state (which is really the saved state of the program being frozen, since it was saved on entry to the Hypervisor, which is what is actually doing the freezing), along with most of the new MEGA65 registers, e.g., those at $D7xx.
The result is that the program gets fairly convincingly frozen. But this is no good, if the program can't be unfrozen after. But this also works just fine now, as the following video of me playing Krakout and freezing and resuming it multiple times shows. (Apologies for the shaky video, I don't have my good camera and tripod here at home. Similarly the general lack of audio due to the Zoom recorder also not being here.)
What is clear is that we can freeze and unfreeze a real game, and it resumes without any noticeable problems. Even multiple times, is not a problem. It also works fine to freeze BASIC, as the following freezing, frozen and un-frozen images show:
Just to prove that it was still alive after, I typed some rubbish:
(Note the fun feature of the later C65 ROMs of showing error messages in red, regardless of what the cursor colour was before).
While I would like the freeze and unfreeze time to be a little faster, it is already quite acceptable. Once we have the 8MB expansion RAM in the MEGA65 working, we will be able to freeze to expansion RAM instead of the SD card in the first instance, which should make freezing and unfreezing several times faster.
In fact, the main limitations at the moment are relatively few:
1. Like most C64 freezers, we can't really freeze the state of the SIDs, because of all those SID registers being write-only, and even if they were readable, they would only show what you wrote, not the current ADSR state of the voices etc. I'll likely add some support for saving and resuming the internal state of the SIDs, so that freezing doesn't mess up music.
2. The CIAs are not currently backed up. This is really just a little oversight, and should be quite trivial to fix.
3. The Hypervisor doesn't sanity-check the state of any previously mounted disk image(s), and re-mount them if still available. Similarly, it doesn't check any other bits and pieces in the process descriptor block after loading it back in.
4. I noticed that by blindly restoring the VIC-IV registers that it is bad if the freeze occurred at a high raster line, because it is possible for the raster compare register to be programmed to an impossibly high raster number. This would cause the program to effectively not resume after unfreezing, unless you manually modified $D011 to clear the high-bit of the raster compare register. Thus I should probably and $D011 with $7F after restoring the machine state.
The main progress is that I am able to save the main memory, the colour RAM, the VIC-IV registers (including the colour palettes), the MEGA65 Hypervisor saved state (which is really the saved state of the program being frozen, since it was saved on entry to the Hypervisor, which is what is actually doing the freezing), along with most of the new MEGA65 registers, e.g., those at $D7xx.
The result is that the program gets fairly convincingly frozen. But this is no good, if the program can't be unfrozen after. But this also works just fine now, as the following video of me playing Krakout and freezing and resuming it multiple times shows. (Apologies for the shaky video, I don't have my good camera and tripod here at home. Similarly the general lack of audio due to the Zoom recorder also not being here.)
What is clear is that we can freeze and unfreeze a real game, and it resumes without any noticeable problems. Even multiple times, is not a problem. It also works fine to freeze BASIC, as the following freezing, frozen and un-frozen images show:
Just to prove that it was still alive after, I typed some rubbish:
While I would like the freeze and unfreeze time to be a little faster, it is already quite acceptable. Once we have the 8MB expansion RAM in the MEGA65 working, we will be able to freeze to expansion RAM instead of the SD card in the first instance, which should make freezing and unfreezing several times faster.
In fact, the main limitations at the moment are relatively few:
1. Like most C64 freezers, we can't really freeze the state of the SIDs, because of all those SID registers being write-only, and even if they were readable, they would only show what you wrote, not the current ADSR state of the voices etc. I'll likely add some support for saving and resuming the internal state of the SIDs, so that freezing doesn't mess up music.
2. The CIAs are not currently backed up. This is really just a little oversight, and should be quite trivial to fix.
3. The Hypervisor doesn't sanity-check the state of any previously mounted disk image(s), and re-mount them if still available. Similarly, it doesn't check any other bits and pieces in the process descriptor block after loading it back in.
4. I noticed that by blindly restoring the VIC-IV registers that it is bad if the freeze occurred at a high raster line, because it is possible for the raster compare register to be programmed to an impossibly high raster number. This would cause the program to effectively not resume after unfreezing, unless you manually modified $D011 to clear the high-bit of the raster compare register. Thus I should probably and $D011 with $7F after restoring the machine state.
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
Working on the MEGA65 Freeze Menu
For a long time, the planned primary interface for controlling the MEGA65 has been planned to be a kind of "freeze menu". While this will be easy for folks to change, our rationale for this is that it allows the machine to boot the BASIC as expected, but still have all the features you want to commonly use, e.g., mounting disk images, loading programs from a menu etc, a single button press away.
A while back, I mentioned that we were planning on having a double-tap of RESTORE trigger this. This has evolved a bit into a long-press of RESTORE (anywhere from ~0.5 seconds to 5 seconds. Longer than that will reset the machine in stead, which we might remove to avoid accidents, especially since the M65 will come with a reset button).
Quite a lot of work has gone on in the background to actually get to the point of having a freeze menu appear and be useful. While it isn't quite there yet, it is now getting much closer. A lot of that work has been on getting functional(ish) freeze and unfreeze routines working, as well as the hypervisor hooks to actually trigger the freeze and load the freeze menu itself.
So let's walk through how this all pulls together, beginning with pressing the RESTORE key, and detecting if it is a normal press of the RESTORE key, a long-press that should trigger the Hypervisor trap that launches the freeze process, or whether it should reset the CPU. This is all in src/vhdl/keymapper.vhdl
-- 0= restore down (pressed), 1 = restore up (not-pressed)
if restore_state='0' and last_restore_state='1' then
-- Restore has just been pressed, do nothing special.
-- (Events happen on rising edge)
elsif restore_state='1' and last_restore_state='0' then
-- Restore has just been released
if restore_down_ticks < 8 then
-- <0.25 seconds = quick tap = trigger NMI
restore_out <= '0';
elsif restore_down_ticks < 32 then
-- 0.25 - ~ 1 second hold = trigger hypervisor trap
hyper_trap <= '0';
hyper_trap_count <= hyper_trap_count_internal + 1;
hyper_trap_count_internal <= hyper_trap_count_internal + 1;
elsif restore_down_ticks < 128 then
-- Long hold = do RESET instead of NMI
-- But holding it down for >4 seconds does nothing,
-- incase someone holds it by mistake, and wants to abort doing a reset.
reset_drive <= '0';
report "asserting reset via RESTORE key";
end if;
else
hyper_trap <= '1';
restore_out <= '1';
reset_drive <= '1';
end if;
When hyper_trap goes to zero, then this tells the CPU to trigger the freezer Hypervisor trap. This really just means that the CPU enters Hypervisor mode after saving register state, and then jumps to a certain location in the Hypervisor programme. To make writing the freeze menu easy, after saving the state of the machine to freeze slot #0, the hypervisor loads in the standard C64 character set and a C65 ROM, and assumes that the freeze menu is a program made for C64 mode with entry point at SYS 2061. This means we can write the freeze menu using CC65, the C compiler for the C64, for example. In the following snippet from kickstart_task.a65 we can see that the Hypervisor already implements a bunch of very handy routines, that make it easy to load the ROM files, and then the freeze menu itself. Loading the freeze menu is performed by setting the name of the file we want to load from the SD card ("FREEZER.M65"), and then providing the 32-bit load address. We load it to $07FF instead of $0800 or $0801 as you might have otherwise expected, because we expect the program to have a normal C64-style $01 $08 header on it, and thus we need to pretend it loads at $07FF so that the first real byte of data is placed at $0801. Otherwise, there is nothing too surprising here. We set the C64 memory map to make life easier for the program, and we also provide a dummy NMI vector, as we have seen race conditions where an NMI can be triggered before a proper NMI vector has been installed. Since we don't enter via the C64/C65 ROM's normal entry point, the NMI vector at $0316 won't get setup automatically, thus requiring this precaution. Finally we set the value of the PC on exit from the Hypervisor, and actually exit the Hypervisor itself:
restore_press_trap:
; Freeze to slot 0
ldx #<$0000
ldy #<$0000
jsr freeze_to_slot
; Load freeze program
jsr attempt_loadcharrom
jsr attempt_loadc65rom
ldx #<txt_FREEZER
ldy #>txt_FREEZER
jsr dos_setname
; Prepare 32-bit pointer for loading freezer program ($000007FF)
; (i.e. $0801 - 2 byte header, so we can use a normal PRG file)
;
lda #$00
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+2
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+3
lda #$07
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+1
lda #$ff
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+0
jsr dos_readfileintomemory
jsr task_set_c64_memorymap
jsr task_dummy_nmi_vector
; set entry point and memory config
lda #<2061
sta hypervisor_pcl
lda #>2061
sta hypervisor_pch
; return from hypervisor, causing freeze menu to start
;
sta hypervisor_enterexit_trigger
The actual freezing happens in the Hypevisor in the freeze_to_slot routine, rather than in the freeze menu. Similarly, unfreezing happens in the Hypervisor as well. This actually solves a lot of problems all at the same time. First, the freeze menu doesn't need to know about changing on-SD formats for the freeze slots. Second, it makes sure that there is a single freeze and a single unfreeze routine used in all situations. Third, it allows use of the extra memory of the Hypervisor, to allow for near-perfect freezing, without corrupting the stack or any other memory. It also means that we can provide a nice simple abstracted interface to allow one program to get itself replaced by another in memory, similar to exec() on UNIX-like systems.
The freeze and unfreeze routines are naturally very similar. They basically consist of a loop that iterates through a range of memory areas that have to be loaded or saved, with an optional pre-save or post-load hook. This allows us to define pseudo regions that save some tricky bits of machine state that we can't just DMA to the SD card. It also makes it quite easy to modify what gets saved. Here is the definition of the list of regions to be saved as they currently stand. We know there are some missing bits, and we have removed some bits to make this easier to read.
freeze_mem_list:
; start address (4 bytes), length (3 bytes),
; preparatory action required before reading/writing (1 byte)
; Each segment will live in its own sector (or sectors if
; >512 bytes) when frozen. So we should avoid excessive
; numbers of blocks.
; SDcard sector buffer + SD card registers
; We have to save this before anything much else, because
; we need it for freezing.
.dword $ffd6000
.word $0290
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_stash_sd_buffer_and_regs
; 384KB RAM (includes the 128KB "ROM" area)
.dword $0000000
.word $0000
.byte 6 ; =6x64K blocks = 384KB
.byte freeze_prep_none
; 32KB colour RAM
.dword $ff80000
.word $8000
.byte $00
.byte freeze_prep_none
; VIC-IV palette block 0
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette0
; VIC-IV palette block 1
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette1
; VIC-IV palette block 2
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette2
; VIC-IV palette block 3
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette3
; Process scratch space
.dword currenttask_block
.word $0100
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; $D640-$D67E hypervisor state registers
; XXX - These can't be read by DMA, so we need to have a
; prep routine that copies them out first?
.dword $ffd3640
.word $003F
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; VIC-IV, F011 $D000-$D0FF
.dword $ffd3000
.word $0100
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; $D700-$D7FF CPU registers
.dword $ffd3700
.word $0100
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; XXX - Other IO chips!
; End of list
.dword $FFFFFFFF
.word $FFFF
.byte $FF
.byte $FF
There are four lots of the VIC-IV palette, because the MEGA65 has four palette banks that can be dynamically selected, but are mapped to the same region of memory, therefore the freeze_prep_paletten routines make sure the correct one is mapped before the area is saved/loaded. These routines are typically quite simple, e.g.:
do_unfreeze_prep_palette_select:
; We do the same memory map setup during freeze and unfreeze
do_freeze_prep_palette_select:
; X = 6, 8, 10 or 12
; Use this to pick which of the four palette banks
; is visible at $D100-$D3FF
txa
clc
sbc #freeze_prep_palette0
asl
asl
asl
asl
asl
ora #$3f ; keep displaying the default palette
sta $d070
rts
Now if we turn our attention to the freeze menu, this basically consists of a normal program that can do whatever we want. The current version just displays a simple set of options (most of which aren't yet implemented), and selects one of them based on key input. Key input is done using the MEGA65's super-easy ASCII keyboard input abstraction layer, where you can basically just read $D610 to get the next key from the keyboard, with all modifiers like SHIFT and CONTROL already applied. Function keys map to $F1 - $FE, making life super simple for menus. Here is the important bit of freezer.c:
// Flush input buffer
while (PEEK(0xD610U)) POKE(0xD610U,0);
// Main keyboard input loop
while(1) {
// POKE(0xD020U,PEEK(0xD020U)+1);
if (PEEK(0xD610U)) {
// Process char
switch(PEEK(0xD610U)) {
case 0xf1: // F1 = backup
break;
case 0xf3: // F3 = resume
// Load memory from freeze slot $0000, i.e., the temporary save space
// This implicitly restarts the frozen program
__asm__("LDX #<$0000");
__asm__("LDY #>$0000");
__asm__("LDA #$12");
__asm__("STA $D642");
__asm__("NOP"); break;
case 0xf7: // F7 = show screen of frozen program
// XXX for now just show we read the key
POKE(0xD020U,PEEK(0xD020U)+1);
break;
}
// Flush char from input buffer
POKE(0xD610,0);
}
}
The highlighted snippet of code makes a Hypervisor call asking for whatever currently lives in freeze slot 0 to be loaded back into memory. This by definition will replace the freeze menu in memory, so there is nothing more to be done. We have gone to quite some effort to make calling the Hypervisor really painless, which I think shows here: All you have to do is prepare the register values for the call, where the accumulator usually indicates the sub-function of the Hypervisor call, and then write to the correct Hypervisor trap address between $D640-$D67F. It doesn't matter what you write, or from which register, as the act of asking the CPU to write to these registers tells it you want to trap to the Hypervisor. The Hypervisor automatically (in just one clock cycle!) saves all process or flags, registers and memory mapping settings, and switches to the Hypervisor memory context. This makes Hypervisor calls very simple and efficient. The only gotcha at the moment is the need to put a NOP or other single-byte junk instruction after the write that triggers the Hypervisor call. This is to work around a bug where sometimes the PC value on exit from the Hypervisor call is incremented by one.
But enough theory already. We want pictures!
Here is the MEGA65 mid-freeze, with border colour action telling you something is happening:
Anyway, that's where things are upto right now. It shouldn't hopefully be too much longer before we can correctly unfreeze with the right colours, and with a running program after.
A while back, I mentioned that we were planning on having a double-tap of RESTORE trigger this. This has evolved a bit into a long-press of RESTORE (anywhere from ~0.5 seconds to 5 seconds. Longer than that will reset the machine in stead, which we might remove to avoid accidents, especially since the M65 will come with a reset button).
Quite a lot of work has gone on in the background to actually get to the point of having a freeze menu appear and be useful. While it isn't quite there yet, it is now getting much closer. A lot of that work has been on getting functional(ish) freeze and unfreeze routines working, as well as the hypervisor hooks to actually trigger the freeze and load the freeze menu itself.
So let's walk through how this all pulls together, beginning with pressing the RESTORE key, and detecting if it is a normal press of the RESTORE key, a long-press that should trigger the Hypervisor trap that launches the freeze process, or whether it should reset the CPU. This is all in src/vhdl/keymapper.vhdl
-- 0= restore down (pressed), 1 = restore up (not-pressed)
if restore_state='0' and last_restore_state='1' then
-- Restore has just been pressed, do nothing special.
-- (Events happen on rising edge)
elsif restore_state='1' and last_restore_state='0' then
-- Restore has just been released
if restore_down_ticks < 8 then
-- <0.25 seconds = quick tap = trigger NMI
restore_out <= '0';
elsif restore_down_ticks < 32 then
-- 0.25 - ~ 1 second hold = trigger hypervisor trap
hyper_trap <= '0';
hyper_trap_count <= hyper_trap_count_internal + 1;
hyper_trap_count_internal <= hyper_trap_count_internal + 1;
elsif restore_down_ticks < 128 then
-- Long hold = do RESET instead of NMI
-- But holding it down for >4 seconds does nothing,
-- incase someone holds it by mistake, and wants to abort doing a reset.
reset_drive <= '0';
report "asserting reset via RESTORE key";
end if;
else
hyper_trap <= '1';
restore_out <= '1';
reset_drive <= '1';
end if;
When hyper_trap goes to zero, then this tells the CPU to trigger the freezer Hypervisor trap. This really just means that the CPU enters Hypervisor mode after saving register state, and then jumps to a certain location in the Hypervisor programme. To make writing the freeze menu easy, after saving the state of the machine to freeze slot #0, the hypervisor loads in the standard C64 character set and a C65 ROM, and assumes that the freeze menu is a program made for C64 mode with entry point at SYS 2061. This means we can write the freeze menu using CC65, the C compiler for the C64, for example. In the following snippet from kickstart_task.a65 we can see that the Hypervisor already implements a bunch of very handy routines, that make it easy to load the ROM files, and then the freeze menu itself. Loading the freeze menu is performed by setting the name of the file we want to load from the SD card ("FREEZER.M65"), and then providing the 32-bit load address. We load it to $07FF instead of $0800 or $0801 as you might have otherwise expected, because we expect the program to have a normal C64-style $01 $08 header on it, and thus we need to pretend it loads at $07FF so that the first real byte of data is placed at $0801. Otherwise, there is nothing too surprising here. We set the C64 memory map to make life easier for the program, and we also provide a dummy NMI vector, as we have seen race conditions where an NMI can be triggered before a proper NMI vector has been installed. Since we don't enter via the C64/C65 ROM's normal entry point, the NMI vector at $0316 won't get setup automatically, thus requiring this precaution. Finally we set the value of the PC on exit from the Hypervisor, and actually exit the Hypervisor itself:
restore_press_trap:
; Freeze to slot 0
ldx #<$0000
ldy #<$0000
jsr freeze_to_slot
; Load freeze program
jsr attempt_loadcharrom
jsr attempt_loadc65rom
ldx #<txt_FREEZER
ldy #>txt_FREEZER
jsr dos_setname
; Prepare 32-bit pointer for loading freezer program ($000007FF)
; (i.e. $0801 - 2 byte header, so we can use a normal PRG file)
;
lda #$00
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+2
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+3
lda #$07
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+1
lda #$ff
sta <dos_file_loadaddress+0
jsr dos_readfileintomemory
jsr task_set_c64_memorymap
jsr task_dummy_nmi_vector
; set entry point and memory config
lda #<2061
sta hypervisor_pcl
lda #>2061
sta hypervisor_pch
; return from hypervisor, causing freeze menu to start
;
sta hypervisor_enterexit_trigger
The actual freezing happens in the Hypevisor in the freeze_to_slot routine, rather than in the freeze menu. Similarly, unfreezing happens in the Hypervisor as well. This actually solves a lot of problems all at the same time. First, the freeze menu doesn't need to know about changing on-SD formats for the freeze slots. Second, it makes sure that there is a single freeze and a single unfreeze routine used in all situations. Third, it allows use of the extra memory of the Hypervisor, to allow for near-perfect freezing, without corrupting the stack or any other memory. It also means that we can provide a nice simple abstracted interface to allow one program to get itself replaced by another in memory, similar to exec() on UNIX-like systems.
The freeze and unfreeze routines are naturally very similar. They basically consist of a loop that iterates through a range of memory areas that have to be loaded or saved, with an optional pre-save or post-load hook. This allows us to define pseudo regions that save some tricky bits of machine state that we can't just DMA to the SD card. It also makes it quite easy to modify what gets saved. Here is the definition of the list of regions to be saved as they currently stand. We know there are some missing bits, and we have removed some bits to make this easier to read.
freeze_mem_list:
; start address (4 bytes), length (3 bytes),
; preparatory action required before reading/writing (1 byte)
; Each segment will live in its own sector (or sectors if
; >512 bytes) when frozen. So we should avoid excessive
; numbers of blocks.
; SDcard sector buffer + SD card registers
; We have to save this before anything much else, because
; we need it for freezing.
.dword $ffd6000
.word $0290
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_stash_sd_buffer_and_regs
; 384KB RAM (includes the 128KB "ROM" area)
.dword $0000000
.word $0000
.byte 6 ; =6x64K blocks = 384KB
.byte freeze_prep_none
; 32KB colour RAM
.dword $ff80000
.word $8000
.byte $00
.byte freeze_prep_none
; VIC-IV palette block 0
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette0
; VIC-IV palette block 1
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette1
; VIC-IV palette block 2
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette2
; VIC-IV palette block 3
.dword $ffd3100
.word $0400
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_palette3
; Process scratch space
.dword currenttask_block
.word $0100
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; $D640-$D67E hypervisor state registers
; XXX - These can't be read by DMA, so we need to have a
; prep routine that copies them out first?
.dword $ffd3640
.word $003F
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; VIC-IV, F011 $D000-$D0FF
.dword $ffd3000
.word $0100
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; $D700-$D7FF CPU registers
.dword $ffd3700
.word $0100
.byte 0
.byte freeze_prep_none
; XXX - Other IO chips!
; End of list
.dword $FFFFFFFF
.word $FFFF
.byte $FF
.byte $FF
There are four lots of the VIC-IV palette, because the MEGA65 has four palette banks that can be dynamically selected, but are mapped to the same region of memory, therefore the freeze_prep_paletten routines make sure the correct one is mapped before the area is saved/loaded. These routines are typically quite simple, e.g.:
do_unfreeze_prep_palette_select:
; We do the same memory map setup during freeze and unfreeze
do_freeze_prep_palette_select:
; X = 6, 8, 10 or 12
; Use this to pick which of the four palette banks
; is visible at $D100-$D3FF
txa
clc
sbc #freeze_prep_palette0
asl
asl
asl
asl
asl
ora #$3f ; keep displaying the default palette
sta $d070
rts
Now if we turn our attention to the freeze menu, this basically consists of a normal program that can do whatever we want. The current version just displays a simple set of options (most of which aren't yet implemented), and selects one of them based on key input. Key input is done using the MEGA65's super-easy ASCII keyboard input abstraction layer, where you can basically just read $D610 to get the next key from the keyboard, with all modifiers like SHIFT and CONTROL already applied. Function keys map to $F1 - $FE, making life super simple for menus. Here is the important bit of freezer.c:
// Flush input buffer
while (PEEK(0xD610U)) POKE(0xD610U,0);
// Main keyboard input loop
while(1) {
// POKE(0xD020U,PEEK(0xD020U)+1);
if (PEEK(0xD610U)) {
// Process char
switch(PEEK(0xD610U)) {
case 0xf1: // F1 = backup
break;
case 0xf3: // F3 = resume
// Load memory from freeze slot $0000, i.e., the temporary save space
// This implicitly restarts the frozen program
__asm__("LDX #<$0000");
__asm__("LDY #>$0000");
__asm__("LDA #$12");
__asm__("STA $D642");
__asm__("NOP"); break;
case 0xf7: // F7 = show screen of frozen program
// XXX for now just show we read the key
POKE(0xD020U,PEEK(0xD020U)+1);
break;
}
// Flush char from input buffer
POKE(0xD610,0);
}
}
The highlighted snippet of code makes a Hypervisor call asking for whatever currently lives in freeze slot 0 to be loaded back into memory. This by definition will replace the freeze menu in memory, so there is nothing more to be done. We have gone to quite some effort to make calling the Hypervisor really painless, which I think shows here: All you have to do is prepare the register values for the call, where the accumulator usually indicates the sub-function of the Hypervisor call, and then write to the correct Hypervisor trap address between $D640-$D67F. It doesn't matter what you write, or from which register, as the act of asking the CPU to write to these registers tells it you want to trap to the Hypervisor. The Hypervisor automatically (in just one clock cycle!) saves all process or flags, registers and memory mapping settings, and switches to the Hypervisor memory context. This makes Hypervisor calls very simple and efficient. The only gotcha at the moment is the need to put a NOP or other single-byte junk instruction after the write that triggers the Hypervisor call. This is to work around a bug where sometimes the PC value on exit from the Hypervisor call is incremented by one.
But enough theory already. We want pictures!
Here is the MEGA65 mid-freeze, with border colour action telling you something is happening:
After a couple of seconds, this is replaced with the freeze menu, which is currently rather spartan. You can probably tell I used to use an Action Replay as my preferred freeze cartridge ;) This program will get a thorough pimping as time goes on.
Finally, here is the view after resuming:
If you want to see it as moving pictures:
There are a few obvious things to point out here:
1. We can clearly trigger loading of the freeze menu program.
2. We can (at least partly) save and restore memory contents and IO registers, as shown by how we manage to restore the C65 BASIC boot screen on un-freeze, complete with switching back to 80 column mode, and restoring colour RAM (so that the bars are different colours etc.
3. The palette is seriously messed up. It turns out I have a bug in the DMAgic implementation when reading the palette, where it gets it one byte late. It might be that we need to have an extra wait-state on reading the palette memory.
4. The frozen program doesn't actually resume after being unfrozen. I'll have to look at the saved registers etc, and see why they aren't getting restored correctly. Actually, it looks like the unfreeze process never quite completes, but is instead stuck loading a sector from the SD card. I'll have to investigate that.Anyway, that's where things are upto right now. It shouldn't hopefully be too much longer before we can correctly unfreeze with the right colours, and with a running program after.
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