pixel wrote:I've spent up to an hour on some replies just to discard them – an example in general of how being interested, even deeply, doesn't resonate with the board.
This situation (i.e. not posting a prepared post but discarding it) can happen anytime. Sometimes that post sits in the text box, you do a preview, try to grasp it from the other's view and see the message probably won't be understood anyway, or may just not serve the intended purpose. And then you may quite as well put it in the bin, indeed.
"Like" buttons would do for some time but only to establish fake realities.
The equivalent are the views or the download counters. For this thread here, as I write this reply, these are a ridiculous high five-digit figure - only a few threads in the Hardware section have more views. By that account, at least a 3-digit figure of people with the necessary skills, given interest - and where necessary, access to an electronic workshop - must have done the VFLI mod.
It's the same with the download counters. They easily go into the 3-digit numbers even for attachments that were better regarded as jokes. Must be bots doing their job. At least here I once decided to pull the plug and move all my stuff to an own server, so there's no visible download counter here in Denial for my attachments anymore, for anyone to do any kind of 'analytics' on that.
And BAM we're off topic. That's how there's no reply. Posted anyway.
Here's your reply.
...
Not just a reply, but some concluding remarks:
In 2010 I devised the VFLI mod as side branch to the (still continuing!) project of tokra and me featuring the graphics capabilities of the VIC-20. At the time already, it was quite clear to me, that the necessary changes would hold off quite some people to do this change to the VIC-20 mainboard. Some others probably discount the mod as 'cheating'. Or they just do not want to reproduce the mod, because it's not their own idea. Whatever.
It is still the original video chip that does the job, and for me, I merely lifted some restrictions that were built into the original mainboard design just be accident. I did not only the hardware redesign, I also wrote the necessary display drivers (one for the VFLI graphics mode itself, one other to do the MAXIGRAFIK display with just 2 NMIs and essentially 0% CPU load) *and* I also wrote a PC based converter so about any image can be transferred to the VIC-20. In addition to that, lots of other examples and support programs (allowing 31231 BYTES FREE for BASIC, for example) to be found in the thread here.
The display driver of the VFLI graphics mode is open source, how the technology behind it works has been documented in the finest detail in the thread "
** Stable rasters on the VIC-20".
Anyone who has the necessary skills (or help from someone with those skills) and given interest should be able to reproduce the mod. The how-to is completely documented in the first page of this thread. Anyone, who does so, is not 'left' with a purposefully changed but otherwise unusable hardware change - but nearly all VIC-20 software still runs and the capabilities of the video subsystem are much improved now, with - again! - already a good lot of examples found in this thread here - enough examples to give the interested coder all the necessary information to write own programs that utilize the VFLI mod!
Just do not expect it's now solely my job to keep people happy with regular updates to this thread. Especially not given its history.
