CHIP-8/SCHIP
Monday, 27th February 2006
It's not as if I didn't already have an excess of projects, but anyway...
The binaries are here. I've tested them fairly extensively on my TI-83 Plus, but be warned that (as it's beta) they might cause odd crashes. Back up any important files!
Next Latenite Beta
Thursday, 23rd February 2006
Seeing as the MaxCoderz fora have died (I can't read or post on them at the temporary hosting), and I know at least kv reads this... 
Latest beta: /bin/latenite/ (full install).
General
- No more hanging or locking up when running the PTI debugger (huzzah!) PindurTI debugger is still horribly, horribly incomplete :( (Boo!)
- Reworked icon extraction code works for all files (no more incorrect icons!)
- File tree plugins (bundled with .emr plugin) to expand certain files into a tree.
- Copy/Paste doesn't accidentally copy/paste if the text editor isn't selected (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V doesn't work anywhere else, though).
- Minor bug fixes here and there; some visible, others invisible.
- Brass template has old defines added for backwards compatibility.
- Updated copy of Brass and Brass XML file.
- Minor tweaks to help file CSS.
- Blue icon bug in Windows versions prior to NT 5.1 (XP) should be fixed.
Known Issues
- Holding tab/shift+tab down adds lots of surplus tabs.
- Anything to do with the debugging (watch, breakpoints) has not been touched, and so old bugs remain there.
- PTI debugger doens't handle errors very gracefully (infinite messagebox loops). Make sure your ROMs are correctly installed!
EarlyMorning Link
For the EarlyMorning interface to work you need to associate .emr files with EarlyMorning. You can do this by double-clicking any .emr file, then browsing to the EarlyMorning binary when prompted. Without this information, Windows won't know where to find EarlyMorning when it wants to open an EarlyMorning file.
If you run Latenite, .emr files should now appear with the EarlyMorning icon, and a little [+] by them. Click this to expand them! Something a bit like this:
Double clicking on a resource should open it in EarlyMorning.
Bear in mind that I forgot to copy kv's PM to disk, so built the interface by guessing. 
Also bear in mind that EarlyMorning (the version I have, at least) has a bug, as it loads itself and expects to load resources relative to the current working directory. Opening a subresource has a hack in Latenite to fix this behaviour, but opening an EMR file by right-click->open will cause EM to crash.
@kv, you need something like this:
private string FixPath(string RelativePath) {
return Path.Combine(Application.StartupPath, RelativePath);
}
private void Something() {
// ... and use it like this:
LoadFromFile(FixPath("Some/Local/Path.ext"));
// Rather than:
LoadFromFile("Some/Local/Path.ext");
}TI-83 Plus Mouse
Tuesday, 21st February 2006
I had another go with my AT protocol routines to see if I could persuade a PS/2 mouse to do anything.
It would appear that I could...
There are two cables for the mouse as there were for the keyboard - one goes to the TI, the other goes to the power supply. The mouse is put into the lowest resolution mode (the cursor is moved 1 pixel per mm).
There's a demo for anyone with a TI-83 Plus and an adapter. It also contains a keyboard demo - and there's a video of that demo here (1MB WMV).
Fortunately, I didn't have to butcher that mouse (it's a rather good miniature USB/PS2 one), but it is connected to the TI with Blu-Tak to keep the wires on the contacts, and isn't very mobile as I only gave the power lead about 15cms clearance. I think it's high time I grabbed myself some proper connectors and a soldering iron from Maplin...
As for the mouse routines - they need a lot of tidying up and making much more reliable, especially in the recovery when a mouse is disconnected then reconnected (my keyboard routines are 'hot pluggable', after all). Extending them to support the Microsoft Intellimouse system, giving the mouse an extra axis (scroll wheel) and two extra buttons would be rather cool as well.
Ultimately, these routines are rather useless until they become widely adopted. Ideally, they could/would be added to a shell, and form part of the standard routines. For example, the shell could provide a "get key" function, which would also transparently return keyboard keys as if they were keys on the keypad, or return four "left" keys if the mouse was moved 4 mm left -- that sort of thing.
Chances of this happening are, sadly, nil.
Microhertz
Monday, 13th February 2006
They say that pictures are what make a journal interesting... but I don't really want to show the pretty pictures I have, as they'd spoil the surprise. Of what, you might ask? Well, I've been developing a TI-83/83+ scene demo, entitled "Microhertz" (for no particular reason). You can download it (and some screenshots, if you really must!) here.
Things have been very busy - a new Latenite beta, riddled with all new exciting "features" (*cough*), has been released... I'm slowly fixing them as and when I can 
It's a bit rubbish for debugging - you can start, pause, and stop a debugging session, but that's about it. Hopefully it won't be too long until I get around to actually sorting out all the debugging gubbins, but I'd rather get the main IDE and the primitive debugging more stable first.
One other TI project I'm working on is updating QuadPlayer. I have a 1.1 version which can play songs from the archive as well as RAM, has a loop function and other little fixes and tweaks. To complement it, I've written a simpler script for creating your own songs, a better Windows-based player for testing (which simulates QuadPlayer's internal sound generation system and has accurate timing) and (best of all) am working on a program that takes PSG VGM files (BBC Micro, Sega Master System &c) and converts them to QuadPlayer songs. So far, any songs that do "exciting" things - vibrato, for example - end up sounding horrible in high octaves (I'm having to limit 10-bit to 8-bit periods), but I have some very decent sounding QuadPlayer files based on Sega VGMs. Some songs use lots of short, fast notes - which sounds great on dedicated hardware, but when you have a delay as QuadPlayer stops outputting a square wave to fetch the next note, sounds crap.