Quote text forwarded from the  message conference.

Hi Errol,

I found this message in the Commodore internet newsgroup.  Thought you
might find it interesting.


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Date : 07-15-94      Time : 16:50    Status : Public - Unread
From : =?iso-8859-1?q?marko_m=e4     Subj   : Measurements (help Needed
To   : All                           Area   : Caamora.Comp 

From: Marko.Makela{at}nic.funet.fi (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Marko_M=E4kel=E4?=)
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 1994 16:50:30 +0100

Hello all!

First a note to all who have been e-mailing or snail-mailing with me:
I will stay here one month longer, that is until August 28, 1994.  My
mail/news delivery subsystem (Andreas Boose
) works adequately fast, so the maximu
m
e-mail reply delay should not be more than three weeks.

I'll also be moving to another room on the same floor in this sucking
student residence, but the post should find its way to me in any case.
So, you can use the current snail mail address:

 Marko Mdkeld
 Ansch|tzstra_e 15, Zi 209
 D-23562 L|beck
 Germany

In case your newsreader or terminal does not obey the headers stating
that the character set is ISO 8859-1, here's an ASCII version of the
address:
 Anschuetzstr. 15, Zi 209
 D-23562 Luebeck
 Germany

My accounts at University of Helsinki may be deleted in early August,
so please use the address on the FTP server of FUNET:

 Marko.Makela{at}FTP.FUNET.FI
or
 msmakela{at}ftp.funet.fi


I read some 30000 lines from the comp.sys.cbm and comp.emulators.misc.
The latter group was full of idiot MS-DOS users, and I had to stop
reading the articles.  But this newsgroup has always something
interesting, like the wonderful articles discussing vector graphics.
Thank you, George Taylor and others!

Well, enough hype.  I have started a project called "rprg" (Real
Programmer's Revenge Guide).  The document, which will be typeset
using LaTeX, shall revenge all of the Commodore 64 and many features
of the Commodore 128.  The most important issues are the processor and
the video chips.  The document will teach you how to make jitter-free
raster effects that also work on CMOS processors, and much much more.
Expect it to be finished when I return to the net (in September).

The d65 project has not advanced much, I only have improved the output
and corrected some minor bugs in the scanning routines.  In case you
don't know my d65 project, it is a symbolic 6500 disassembler with a
pseudo-recursive scanning algorythm that detects data blocks very
effectively.

I also made an own $DE00 scanner program that measures the whole video
timing and saves the tables on disk.  The version attached to the end
of this message is for PAL systems only (Australia and most parts of
Europe).

I have also made two measurement programs for NTSC (the North American
television system).  You know, there are at least two significantly
different versions of the NTSC video chips around.  The first versions
have 64 cycles per line and the newer ones have 65 cycles per line.
Unfortunately it cannot be reliably told which system has 64 cycles
and which 65 cycles.  In any case, the NTSC version of the C128 always
has 65 cycles per line, just like the newest C64's.

So, if you have an NTSC system, it's best that you measure the timing
with both programs, unless you are 100% sure of the amount of cycles
per line on your video chip.  The NTSC measurement programs do not
measure the full timing, but the very bottom of the screen.

I hope that as many of you as possible run the programs on your systems
(C64 or C128) and send the resulting files to Andreas Boose's account
.  Only in this way we can see
what kind of differences there are in the video memory accesses.

I have written two C programs that simulate the results of the PAL timin
g
measurement programs.  Their output matches the PAL timing.  So, it is
pretty easy for me to analyze the NTSC test results you send to me: I
just have to patch the programs a little.  The programs are available
on request from Andreas Boose, but beware: there isn't any user guide.
Anyway, examining the programs does not reveal much more than reading
the PAL timing article I posted here a couple of months ago.

Well, I also measured the test mode of the $D030 register on the C128.
The $D012 register is zero all the time, and the video chip makes the
normal memory accesses for overscan area, that is, for most of the
time it reads the last byte of the video bank (except when in Enhanced
Color Mode), and then fetches the sprite pointers.  But the order of
the memory refreshes was weird.  I haven't analyzed the memory refresh
address table yet.  This mode disables the video interrupts, at least th
e
raster compare interrupt.

Enough analyzing?  Not yet.  I tried to find the cycle of the noise
waveform on the SID.  The measurement loop was 32 cycles/sample, and I
used the frequency divisor $8000 so that the noise value changed on
every sample.  The cycle could be $392D==14637 samples:

2100 C3 52 AA 85 34 07 40 2A CD 18 96 50 28 A5 38 02
592D C3 52 AF CC 36 95 48 2E F8 18 94 78 61 B1 AA 43

As you can see, pretty many samples are near each other, but there is
some noise in the values.  Maybe I should try it on other sound chips,
but I have only two 6581's here.

Has anybody else tried to find out the cycle length of the noise
waveform?  Maybe I should have used a 64-cycles-long loop which would
have filled the whole 1 MB memory of my C128 with the noise values, or
to use an even longer delay loop and take every 16th value or so.  But I

cannot believe that the cycle could be that long.


Best regards,

 Marko


Appendix A: Timing measurement program for PAL systems.
(For use in Australia and most of Europe)

begin 644 tutkain.pal
M`0{at}+",H'GC(P-C$```!XJ32%`:D`A?NHHL"&_)'[R-#[.&D`YOS0]*)`AOR8
MD?O(T/KF_!#VJ3>%`5BFNM`"H{at}BI`:{at}{at}NO^I"**:H`{at}{at}O?^I`(6+J1"%C*D)
MA8VEC:2WB#AI0)&[I8T*"{at}H*"{at}D$JJEV:B"B"*F+IL.DQ"#8_\:-$-E{at}C:,)
MCJ0)IO[D_O#\I?V1P^;#T`+FQ&!424U)3DJ-%0-88```J56-%`.I"8T5`ZT`W4{at}I_`D`C0#=
M[A+0J0&-&=!8H`F(T/U86%A86&B-`-U,,>H`J26-%`.I"8T5`ZX2T*G_1?[L
M$M#P`.X{at}T,K*CA+0A?ZI`8T9T*7[J{at}GXJ*7\A?V*1OUJ1OUJ1OUJJNB.G`FB
9!\{at}0`,H0^J(`I?W*T/NM$M#.(-"%_4R!ZJ7\
`
end

Appendix C: Timing measurement program for NTSC, 64 cycles/line.
(For use with old-style 64's in America and Japan
(run also the tutkain.65 program))

begin 644 tutkain.64
M`0{at}+",H'GC(P-C$```!XJ32%`:D`A?NHHL"&_)'[R-#[.&D`YOS0]*)`AOR8
MD?O(T/KF_!#VJ3>%`5BFNM`"H{at}BI`:{at}{at}NO^I"**:H`{at}{at}O?^I`(6+J1"%C*D)
MA8VEC:2WB#AI0+&[I8T*"{at}H*"{at}D$HO2I.R"B"*F+IL.DQ$S8_V!{at}8`!{at}C:,)
MCJ0)IO[D_O#\I?V1P^;#T`+FQ&!424U)3DJ-%0-88```J56-%`.I"8T5`ZT`W4{at}I_`D`C0#=
M[A+0H{at}&.&=!8H`F(T/U86%A86&B-`-U,,>KJJ26-%`.I"9T4`ZX2T*G_1?[L
M$M#P`.X{at}T,K*CA+0A?ZI`8T9T*7[J{at}GXJ*7\A?V*1OUJ1OUJ1OUJJNB.G`FB
9!\{at}0`,H0^J(`I?W*T/NM$M#.(-"%_4R!ZJ7\
`
end

Appendix B: Timing measurement program for NTSC, 65 cycles/line.
(For use in America and Japan)

begin 644 tutkain.65
M`0{at}+",H'GC(P-C$```!XJ32%`:D`A?NHHL"&_)'[R-#[.&D`YOS0]*)`AOR8
MD?O(T/KF_!#VJ3>%`5BFNM`"H{at}BI`:{at}{at}NO^I"**:H`{at}{at}O?^I`(6+J1"%C*D)
MA8VEC:2WB#AI0+&[I8T*"{at}H*"{at}D$HO2I.R"B"*F+IL.DQ$S8_V!{at}8`!{at}C:,)
MCJ0)IO[D_O#\I?V1P^;#T`+FQ&!424U)3DJ-%0-88```J52-%`.I"8T5`ZT`W4{at}I_`D`C0#=
M[A+0J0&-&=!8H`F(T/U86%A86&B-`-U,,>KJJ26-%`.I"8T5`ZX2T*G_1?[L
M$M#P`.X{at}T,K*CA+0A?ZI`8T9T*7[J{at}GXJ*7\A?V*1OUJ1OUJ1OUJJNB.G`FB
9!\{at}0`,H0^J(`I?W*T/NM$M#.(-"%_4R!ZJ7\
`
end

Appendix D: Low bytes of memory refresh addresses
     in the C128's $D030 test mode.

begin 644 refresh.128
M^N'(KY8-]-O"J2`'[M6\,QH!Z,]&+13[XEE`)P[U;%,Z(0A_9DTT&Y)Y8$QC2C$8_W9=1"L2B7!7/B6C/MIV$
M^^+)L)<.]=S#JB$([]:]-!L"Z=!'+A7\XUI!*`_V;50[({at}F`9TXU')-Z84{at}O
MIHUT6T*YH(=N512P3BG%8/R:=A&M2.;"7?F5,PZJ1>%_6O:2+^-1P#ZM%(+Q;]Y%M"*1#W;E4\(PJ!:$\V'91[8DDP
MIXYU7$.ZH8AO5LVTFX)IX,>NE7SSVL&HCP;MU+NB&0#GSK4L$_KAR#\F#?3;
M4CD{at}!^YE3#,:`7A?1BT4BW)90">>A6Q3.K&8?V9-Q*N2>6#7OJ6,<^K1N)^&
M_>3+LID0]][%K",*\=B_-AT$Z])),!?^Y5Q#*A'X;U8])`N":5`W'I5\8THQ
MJ(]V742[HHEP5\ZUG(-JXF'8OZ:-=.O2N:"'
M_N7,LYH1^-_&K20+\MG`-QX%[--*,1C_YEU$*Q+Y<%<^)0R#:E$X'Y9]9$LR
MJ9!W7D6\HXIQ6,^VG81KXLFPEW[UW,.JD0COUKVD&P+IT+.=>S3NJ&(
M_^;-M)L2^>#'KB4,\]K!.!\&[=1+,AD`YUY%+!/Z<5{at}_){at}V$:U(Y()=^94PS
MJI%X7T:]I(MR6="WGH5LX\JQF'_VW
M53PC"O%H3S8=!'MB23`7CG5<0RJAB&]6/;2;{at}FE0QZZ5?&/:P:B/=NW4NZ*)
M`.?.M9P3^N'(KR8-]-O".2`'[M5,,QH!Z%]&+13[^I8QS6M&XGX9MY,NRF8#WWL6LDPKQV+^F'03KTKDP%_[ES$,J$?C?
M5CTD"_)I4#!7QC2C$8CW9=1"NBB7!7/K6<{at}VI1R*^6?63;PJF0=^[5O*.*
M`>C/MIT4^^+)L"<.]=S#.B$([]9--!L"Z6!'+A7\12RCBG%8/[:=A&M2R;"7?F7._6O:2+
M`NG0MYX5_./*L2{at}/]MW$.R()\-=.-1P#ZF%(+Q;]=%M"*1"';E4\(YJ!:$\V
MK91[8DG`IXYU7-.ZH8AOYLVTFX+YX,>NE0SSVL&H'P;MU+LR&0#GSD4L$_KA
M6#\F#?1K4CD{at}!WYE3#,:D7A?1BVDBW)90+>>A6Q3RK&8?V;=Q*N2>?#7OJ6,
M`^K1N)\6_>3+LBD0]][%/",*\=A/-AT$ZV)),!?^=5Q#*A&(;U8]))N":5`W
4KI5\8TK!J(]V7=2[HHEPY\ZUG(-/
`
end

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