Re: Introduction & Question

From: Tom Hudson <tomhudson_at_execpc.com>
Date: Mon May 21 2012 - 02:17:43 EDT

On 5/20/2012 11:13 PM, Clay Cowgill wrote:
> Dave's a great guy. He was a contractor for one of my projects when we were doing a lot
> of Macintosh stuff at Supra. Probably one of the last cool "hack" projects we were
> doing-- a native SCSI interface for our modems so we could get around speed limitations
> on the Mac UARTs. ;-)
Dave was the freakin' KING of hack projects! His "Magic Sack" Mac-on-the-Atari-ST product
was one of those things most people only dream of doing. I mean, what a challenge -- and
he pulled it off! Apple was not amused, though. They did everything they could to dry up
the supply of Mac ROMs.
> Did you guys ever get one of the math coprocessor carts Supra was working on for the
> 400/800/XL/XE? Mark White had a pretty good mode 7+ Battlezone clone that used the
> coprocessor for the transforms, but I don't think he ever finished it. Not sure if any
> of those went out to magazines or developers or not. I think the ST arrived and the
> 8-bit stuff faded pretty quickly...
Nope, never had that! Never even heard about it before today, in fact. Oh, the things I
could have done with that! I wrote a Battlezone clone for the 400/800 back in 1982 but
all the transforms were done with a big table. With the 6502 that was how I did almost
anything requiring math -- just so much faster. In some of the old discussions I found
online with Jeff Hendrix talking about the Space Wars/Space Duel conversion, there was
some talk about possibly adding a coprocessor so that developers could streamline certain
math operations, such as collision detection (computing the intersection between a
bullet's line of travel and the lines of a spaceship, for example). Definitely a cool
idea, maybe a little overkill, but still cool.

> Yeah, let me send you an email off-list. I wrote "Vector Breakout" that runs on Tempest
> hardware back in 1999, so I can give you a jump-start on a lot of that "make it work on
> real hardware" stuff.
That would be beyond awesome. So do all you guys use the same macro assembler? I'd be
happy to go with TASMx, given the fact that it has been designed with the vector hardware
in mind.

I think that before bedtime tonight I'll go locate my old ROM burner and eraser.... I'm
gonna need it! :-)

Seriously, this is one of those projects that I flat-out LOVE. When I'm working on
something like this, I just can't wait to get into the office in the morning. The "Star
Rangers" project was like that.

-Tom

-- 
Thomas Hudson
http://portev.org -- Electric Vehicles, Solar Power&  More
http://klanky.com -- Animation Projects
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Received on Mon May 21 02:18:19 2012

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