Earxtutchap10
CHAPTER 10 : ATARI HARDWARE
As you might have read in the precious chapters the Atari hardware (video,
audio, I/O, etc.) can be used in two ways:
1) By using the OS-calls supplied by BIOS, GEMDOS and XBIOS.
2) By using the hardwareregister in highmemory directly.
Using the hardware directly is always faster, because the OS-routines are
incredibly slow and often not flexible enough. For games and demos it's
always a better solution to use the hardware directly.
Only for a few purposes the OS need still be used:
* I/O (loading and saving)
* memoryallocation (reserving ST-RAM and reserving temporary buffers)
For serious applications using the hardware directly is definitely more of a
risk, since these need to be far more stabile. The hardwareregisters have
been modified in almost every Atari throughout the years and this causes
major incompatibility.
This is the main reason for old ST games not working on TT or Falcon (or any
clone, cos these have completely different hardware). Nicely written ST-
applications only using textdisplay or GEM, will work on every ATARI and
even clones.
But this chapter is only dedicated to how to use the hardwareregisters. So
let's get down to bussiness. I will explain the ST and Falcon specific
hardwareregisters here. The TT was never used for games or demos and coders
always used OS-calls (well, Jeff Minter did a TT version of Mutant Camels
and there was a great StarWars demo).
ST registers:
Most ST registers are still aboard every Atari (megaST, (mega)STe, TT,
Falcon) and there aren't that many. They are used for basic stuff such as
reading or installing a new screenaddress, modifying the pallette of the
screen, switching the three resolutions, etc. Furthermore there's stuff like
getting blip & blop sounds out of the YM2149 and reading mouse/joystick/
keyboard.
* Screenbaseaddress:
Games use two or three screenbuffers and you have to use new locations for
those. So you need to save and restore the systems screenaddress and kick in
your own. This is done by addressing the screenbase registers:
screenbase high: $ffff8201
This specifies the high byte of the screenbase-address.
screenbase mid: $ffff8203
This specifies the middle byte of the screenbase-address.
screenbase low: $ffff820d
This specifies the low byte of the screenbase-address.
This is only avaibable on (mega)STe, TT and Falcon!
You can read and write to all these registers but is required to write in
the following order: high, mid, low. Otherwise the address won't be put in
correctly!
The address is 24bits and so you can see the screen can only be located in
the ST-RAM: the first 16MB of RAM. On a basic ST you must always set the
address on a 256byte boundary because is has no lowbyte register.
The low register is only handy is when want to do hardware scrolling. On the
STe you can set addresses on 2byte boundaries. The Falcon has to settle for
4byte boundaries and the TT for 8byte ones. It's recommended to stay off the
lowbyte unless you want to do hardwarescroll, because setting the screen
will then work on all Atari's.
* ST Palette:
The ST palette is used in ST-low and ST-medium resolutions. They are 16
words containing red,green and blue intensities.
$ffff8240: ____rRRRgGGGbBBB
.........
$ffff825e:
Chapter 2 explains how these work exaclty. The basic ST support only 9 bits
colorcodes (512), whilst the (mega)STe, TT and Falcon support 12 bits
(4096).
The good thing about the ST-palette is that you can change it very fast. You
can give every scanline a different palette, by using some clever tricks.
* YM2149 soundchip:
The previous registers are all easily programmable (i.e. one register always
has one function). The sounchip is not so easy to access. It relies on
selecting registers with one selector-register.
$ffff8800: writing = registerselect (0-15)
reading = read data from selected register
$ffff8802: write data to selected register
So writing a number to $ffff8800 will cause a select on one of the internal
registers:
0 = PSG_APITCHLOW
1 = PSG_BPITCHHIGH
2 = PSG_BPITCHLOW
3 = PSG_BPITCHHIGH
4 = PSG_CPITCHLOW
5 = PSG_CPITCHHIGH
6 = PSG_NOISEPITCH
7 = PSG_MODULATION
8 = PSG_AVOLUME
9 = PSG_BVOLUME
10 = PSG_CVOLUME
11 = PSG_FREQLOW
12 = PSG_FREQHIGH
13 = PSG_ENVELOPE
14 = PORT A
15 = PORT B
The first 14 registers can be used for normal soundprogramming. Things like
changing frequency, volume, waveformtype, noisegeneration are included. The
Yammy is not hard to program once you've got a good interruptroutine able
to access all these bits, but the Yammy doesn't sound very impressive. Only
the elite of musicians can get great stuff out of it.
For non-musicians the last two registers are important! PORT A is used for
all kinds of purposes. With it you can select between diskdrives and check
the printer status. On falcon you can turn off the internal speaker, IDE-
drive and reset the DSP.
PORT B is used to read/write from/to the parallel port (aka centronics or
printerport).
* Multi Function Peripheral:
I see this as the nastiest piece of work in the basic ST. The MFP has got
tons of registers that can be used to program interrupts and communicate
with hardware such as the keyboard/mouse/joystick and monitor detect,
RS232 control, midi, etc.
Only keyboard/mouse/joystick and timer B/C I'll talk about here. The only
100% correct way to get keyboard/mouse info either to use GEM (AES) calls
or write your own IKBD interruptroutine. Using GEM is slow, requires
memory and doesn't support the joystick. Coding your own routine is a very
tricky afair.
The MFP has many registers which workings can be quite extreme in some
cases. I'm not going further into it and I refer to the ProfiBuch which
contains all information you'd ever want to know about coding the MFP.
* Intelligent KeyBoarD proccessor (ACIA):
This is the chip that sends interrupt signals to the MFP when a key is
pressed or the mouse and joystick are moved. You can also "poll" from it.
Which means you can directly ask it's status by accessing a hardware
register. This is only useful for reading the keyboard.
Polling for the mouse or joystick is virtually impossible. You need to
install your own interrupt-routine at address $118 for that.
$fffffc00: IKBD command-register
This allows you to change the modi of the keyboard/mouse/joystick. You can
for instance set the mouse-information to relative offsets or absolute
offsets.
$fffffc02: IKBD data-register
From here you can read a byte that represents a keycode. If you use an
interrupt you can also use it to figure out if the mouse/joystick status
is changed.
Eventhough these are only two registers, the IKBD isn't that easy to code.
To initialize it you must switch off interrupts, put a few bytes on the
command-register, install your own $118 routine that does the reading from
the data-register whenever something happens. These can be packets of 5
bytes in a row. And there are a lot of different possible packets.
Enhanced joystick ports (STe/Falcon):
These are much easier to use than the IKBD. But this is becuase the enhanced
joystickports are quite new stuff. In 1990 they were first used. Probably it
was quite expensive to fit many directly mapped registers into the first ST.
The STe has these ports and they are far superior to the old joystick ports.
(and easy to reach as well :))
It's strange noone wanted to use these in the beginning.. Maybe because
Atari never made joysticks for them in the beginning? Who knows ;-) Paddles
and lightpens can also be connected to them, but the problem was that this
can of apparatus is rare. Only in 1994 ATARI started making the Jaguar
Joypads (quite sturdy and excellent control).
$ffff9200: Joyad buttons
$ffff9202: Joypad movement
$ffff9210: Paddle0 position
$ffff9212: Paddle1 position
$ffff9214: Paddle2 position
$ffff9216: Paddle3 position
$ffff9220: Lightpen X
$ffff9222: Lightpen Y
All these registers can simply be polled. As far as I know there isn't an
OS-call to get the values of these registers for you, but who cares. All
registers are full-words and aren't overlapped in any way (luckily).
For nowadays game-coding it's best to poll the registers every VBL. Only
every animation frame could not be exact enough. Also you can ignore the
paddle and lightpen position registers. The jagpad doesn't use any of these.
Hardware scrolling registers ((mega) STe/TT/Falcon):
Since the STe (1990) every ATARI is equipped with hardware scrolling.
Hardware scrolling is pixelwise scrolling by using the lowbyte screenbase
register and some more interesting registers.
Enhanced joy ports: Ports on the side of the STe and Falcon which jaguar
pads can be connected to.
Hardware scrolling: Pixelwise scrolling with almost 0% CPU-time. Can be
done by writing to a few registers every VBL.
Joypad: Jaguar joypad. Has 3 firebuttons, a direction-pad,
select and option buttons as well as 12 general
purpose buttons.
Polling: Reading from a hardwareregister in normal
programflow (NOT from within an interrupt!)
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