I've been silently working on a thing for the past few days now. That "thing" happens to be video-card emulation for The HoneyCrisp Emulator! Specifically, I've been working on integrating Claudio Parmigiani's (P-LAB's) TMS9918A-based video card into the emulator, which allows for multiple graphic modes including:
- Text mode,
- two bitmap-capable graphics modes (the second of which enables full bitmapped images by resolving color per-scanline instead of per-character),
- multicolor graphics mode.
Mind you, the TMS9918A is the same video-display-processor that can be found in the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a, ColecoVision, and MSX line of computers. (Albeit, these machines used slight variants of the same VDP family depending on your region) Therefore, you get equally as fantastic graphical capabilities! The video-card, via its on-board 16KB of VRAM, outputs a NTSC composite video signal to a SECOND display monitor so it doesn't have to override or piggyback off of the APPLE-1's main terminal display. Of course, this is also emulated with The HoneyCrisp Emulator. So far, I've tested an entire suite of small demo programs, a version of TETRIS that was written for the APPLE-1 (with the VDP-card attached) and a program that loads a high-resolution image. So far, the integration of this card has gone very smoothly, and is looking very promising. That said, it's still an experimental integration that isn't exactly ready for public use yet. I still have quite a bit of R&D to do so I can make the emulated card easier to program for, and easier to use overall. More to come soon. I also published a YouTube video demonstrating this experiment that can be found using the link below.
LINK TO THE VIDEO: P-LAB APPLE-1 Video Card | HoneyCrisp Emulator Integration TestCheers,Landon