Beta Testers Needed

[tokra]

Is there a demand for this? It would be interesting to implement (as well as the PLOT command) but is anyone ever likely to make use of it?

As a general rule: Do not expect people to ever use any tool you provide for an actual product, other than tinkering with it for the fun of it. While Mike and myself have produced several graphic-modes and tools in the past that would easily lend themselves to being used by others (like Maxiedit, HFLI-Mode and Mike's Minimon-cartridge), actual use cases by others are a rare occurence. Mike's MINIGRAFIK-mode might be an exception, but even there most stuff for it was done by Mike himself.

So, essentially, do your thing and if you can use it for a project of your own, all the better. In the end it is just a hobby anyways.

[8BitGuru]

Yah that's my point I guess. I could spend another year tuning and adding features, but for whom?

FAST-40 is something I wanted to do to prove that I could, more than anything else. I've achieved my personal objective - it exists and does what I wanted it to do, and seems pretty robust - which means if anyone else ever plays with it they'll hopefully have a non-irritating time.

I'm gonna give Beta 3 a few more days for everyone who's volunteered to kick it around a bit more if they want to, and then strip out the debugging code and officially release it as v1.0 in the 2025 Releases thread. The package will include the full sourcecode, so anyone who wants to extend its capabilities after that will be more than welcome to.

Many thanks for your bughunting, Tokra. Mathom has also found a couple of important glitches too, so I tip my hat to the pair of you. FAST-40 is definitely better today than it was when Beta 1 dropped.

[tokra]

Cheers, also for the sourcecode to analyze and maybe even fix/improve the end-product even further

[8BitGuru]

The JiffyDOS crash has been resolved.

Mathom pointed me at the JiffyDOS shop, so I bought a copy of the ROM image and then did a whole bunch of testing and differential comparisons between stock ROM and JiffyDOS code.

Obviously JiffyDOS makes quite a few changes and (having never used it) I had assumed it was just replacing the tape I/O and some other serial device logic, but it also does a few other tricks and moves some things around slightly.

What was tripping FAST-40 up was the keyboard decode routine, vectored through $028F. I have to hook it in order to handle the SHIFT+CBM characterset switch, but then I jump back into the ROM to let the rest of the decode happen as normal. However JiffyDOS reworks that routine and removes a lot of unnecessary NOPs, which results in the continuation point I need to jump back into being at a lower address. And that means some Stack usage doesn't get tidied-up, which eventually leads to an RTS popping the wrong return address somewhere and it's Game Over.

So now FAST-40 has a JiffyDOS-detection routine that runs during startup and alters the decode address accordingly, and then there's no more crash. I also tweaked the startup message to show the JiffyDOS banner if it's present.

There have been no other bug reports during Beta 3 so I'm declaring this latest build the Release version. I'm going to package everything up, do a few more days' playtesting to see if I can make anything else squeak, and then ship it with a post to 2025 Releases.

[MrSterlingBS]

Hello,

i have tested the 40 char screen a lot with the programms from the book "Compute´s Programming the VIC".
Most of the programms are running well and there are only the limitationas as desribte by Tokra to POKE directly into the screen.
I would like to have the ball demo from the VIC-20 handbook

BR
Sven

[Orangeman96]

Hello,

i have tested the 40 char screen a lot with the programms from the book "Compute´s Programming the VIC".
Most of the programms are running well and there are only the limitationas as desribte by Tokra to POKE directly into the screen.
I would like to have the ball demo from the VIC-20 handbook

BR
Sven

Sven,

Here ya' go...

OGM

From page 64 of:
Personal Computing on the VIC-20
A friendly computer guide
5th Edition
©1982 Commodore Electronics Limited and Avalanche Productions

Code: Select all

10 print chr$(147)
20 poke 36879,9
30 poke 36878,15
40 x=1
50 y=1
60 dx=1
70 dy=1
80 poke 7680+x+22*y,81
90 for t=1 to 10 : next
100 poke 7680+x+22*y,32
110 x=x+dx
120 if x=0 or x=21 then dx=-dx : poke36876,220
130 y=y+dy
140 if y=0 or y=22 then dy=-dy : poke36786,230
150 poke 36876,0
160 goto 80

[Mike]

For the sheer fun of it, I tried out MINIMON in FAST-40:



It works!

Moving the cursor back into the disassembly or into the hex dump does as supposed and lets the user change code or hex data.

When MINIMON has been started with SYS 38912, it superimposes its own idea where the BRK and NMI vector should point to, but it plays nice with FAST-40 upon STOP/RESTORE and lets it take precedence here, so the BRK and NMI vector are defaulted to the FAST-40 values.

I have also found out FAST-40 makes good use of the buffer at $02A1..$02FF ... it's a good thing MINIMON leaves that one untouched:



There's also a new BASIC command, RESET, which restarts the VIC-20 into the FAST-40 start-up prompt, and which I've not found mentioned here thus far.

Greetings,

Michael


P.S. to give people a good idea why the name FAST-40 is appropiate: in MINIMON, the command M C000 FFFF needs 01:13 minutes in 22 columns and still just 01:22 minutes in FAST-40's 40 columns.

[8BitGuru]

Thanks Mike, that is very cool.

And you're right, I've completely forgotten to post details from the README markdown file here - it's included in the download package ZIP I added to the 2025 Releases post (which includes the binary and full sourcecode) but didn't actually mention that anywhere.

As well as describing the RESET command and its parameter, it also details all the memory areas FAST-40 uses and highlights the caveats and cautions that coders need to be aware of should they desire to write/modify programs to work with it. I include a link to the version in the GitHub repo as that's likely to always be the most up-to-date version: FAST-40 README