Incoming new core: Amstrad PCW

[teller]

Can't get Starglider to boot.

[breiztiger]

you must load cpm before insert starglider dsk and type sglider

[teller]

Awesome! Thanks for your help!

[HerrBerzerk]

Hi,

anyone with a hint for the PCW 9512/9256 CP/M boot/utilities/Loco disk? Can not find them at all....

Thank you!

[EeDee]

Hi,

anyone with a hint for the PCW 9512/9256 CP/M boot/utilities/Loco disk? Can not find them at all....

Thank you!

Try searching for a Retro Archive site for PCW

[HerrBerzerk]

Try searching for a Retro Archive site for PCW

I searched for hours, but gladly someone gave it to me.

[albconde]

Hi i made some changes to the pcw core:

• Update the framework
  Update the T80
  Add support for PCWPlus fake colour modes 1 and 2 ( in new hombrew like AMC , Mad Mix Game , Coliseum, phantomas2 )
  Add support for load 4 colour palette ( same format as gameboy core)
  Add some changes from bigmist version

You can check the change in the source code Here :https://github.com/albconde/Amstrad-PCW_MiSTer
in the palette folder you have some examples of palettes that work in the core.

PCWPlus color mode 3 is not implemente at this point , and the new game hundra not work.

[akeley]

Big thank you for working on the core for this niche-but-awesome machine.

Any chance you could look into display on 15 kHz CRT? It's always been shifted a bit to the left and up in PAL. I think on real machine it would be centered by default.
I believe there are no visible pixels lost so it's not that bad, just a cosmetic annoyance.

[albconde]

Hi, i will try but my crt ( 1084s) alow to move the image, and is more visible than yours ,so i need some test from you to adjust the values .
Please test this core and tell me if this is better or worse

[akeley]

Thank you for looking into this.

Sorry for the low quality pic, difficult to take one in daytime due to reflections.

At the moment, the top seems unchanged (EDIT: nah, after closer look I can see the image did move down - can see extra one of those fat white lines)

There is a horizontal shift, and the left / right black gap ratio is about 1 "unit" on the left to 2-2.3 on the right. So I guess the image could be moved to the right slightly (about 0.5 unit) and more down (2-3 units?)

Out of curiosity, would it be very difficult to implement H / V offset controls similar to those in arcade cores or the latest PCXT core?

[albconde]

Hi , if you see this game in hdmi , the game have a black portion in the botton , and in the upper side start with 6 white lines , as in you capture , the game is not center verticaly originaly .
If you want to check all screen need a game that have a full 720X256 screen for example in the new hombrew AMC ( astro marine corps ) the loading screen is "full screen" . ( you cand download free from itch.io)
I will move the image a little to the right , but verticaly i think is correct.
I can try to implemnt a H/V offset but in general Sorgelic not like this solutions , except for arcade cores , maybe he do not accept this change .

[albconde]

hi , I made two test core more , 1 with 2 pixels move to right , and the second with 4 pixels move to the right , check with is better and if this is enought in your case.
I will made a version with h/V offset , but i need to first to check what is the "better" standard position.

[Stinky]

Big thank you for working on the core for this niche-but-awesome machine.

I wouldn't consider pcw so niche, it was the best selling 8 bit computer series after the commodore64/128, 8 million sold!

[akeley]

Ok, I uploaded some photos to a gallery here: https://postimg.cc/gallery/2DCrFVyH

Sorry again for them not being very clear, the daytime reflections make life hard. One big problem is to see the active area properly on this monitor. There's a thin black area between bezel and actual active screen area on the left, right, and bottom, which should be ignored. Also, on top of the screen the bezel looks a bit like active area but it's not. I made some crude drawings on a couple of pics to better illustrate that.

I used the 4px text core for photos, the 2px one looks pretty similar. Overall, I'd say it could still use a slight shift to the right and bigger one down (although it's all already better, thanks!)

In the photos you can see
-the grid from SNES 240p suite for overall comparison of this monitor's setup
-AMC loading screen
-Jewels of Darkness: can compare with this video of live PCW: https://youtu.be/B9KnrHJQW_8?t=1552
-Guild Of Thieves: compare with: https://youtu.be/bwuH09S5YSE?t=911
-Gnome Ranger: compare with: https://youtu.be/bwuH09S5YSE?t=945
-blank boot screen, shows core's active area pretty well. Can be compared with: https://youtu.be/bwuH09S5YSE?t=817

In the Guild Of Thieves one you can see the words "In The Boat" in the top left corner being visible now, though not 100% yet.

Thanks again for your work, if you need more pics please let me know.

I think H/V control would be great for this core, and it has been accepted for PCXT recently. Of course this machine was meant primarily for work with a dedicated monitor and I think it could be corrected (it has VHold?) there...on normal consumer sets now, or even PVMs it usually requires going into service menu, which is not always possible and also breaks other cores' alignment.

Some unrelated things:

-In the Jewels Of Darkness video you can see "Drive is A:" in the bottom right corner. But not in the other video, and not in our core. Any idea what is it?
-any chance to make OSD not quit after mounting a disk? Because I think most of the time we need to reboot, which requires going back into OSD (more often than just change disk)
-I wanted to try the game On The Run (it's in the Guild video, towards the end). It’s on a disk called Distractions, but it crashes with glitching for me

@Stinky: sure, it sold well (as a text editor workhorse). But compared to main 8-bit machines it's quite forgotten. For me being niche is not detrimental though, more of a badge of honour

[albconde]

Thanks for the images , i will move the image a little to the right and down , and made a version with h/V control , and put here later .
I want to made a "stable" version with this changes , and made a pull requesto to the mister repo this weekend if nothing importan is found , to use this version as a base , and then try to fix other things .
No idea about the jewels of Darkness "drive is A:", i will check
The change disk in OSD ,i will check if there are and option in the framework for this, not sure.
And about other bug i have two on the list : hundra crash and On the run crash ,
I can not promise to fix this bugs , but i try .

[albconde]

Test version with h/V control .Please confirm if you think these settings are sufficient.

[EeDee]

-any chance to make OSD not quit after mounting a disk? Because I think most of the time we need to reboot, which requires going back into OSD (more often than just change disk)

Hi @akeley can you give a few examples as I've not really noticed an inconvenience. I can then make a comparison

[albconde]

-In the Jewels Of Darkness video you can see "Drive is A:" in the bottom right corner. But not in the other video, and not in our core. Any idea what is it?

I've been looking for information and haven't found much, but it seems that the message appears if you have a single disk drive, with two drives it doesn't appear
The actual configuration have 2 disk so this is not show .
If you go to the mister repo and download the first version of the core (20 08 15) this version only have 1 disk and the text "drive is A:" is shown if you load a cp/m disk
I test in the emu CP/M Box with the same result in mode 8256 ( 1 drive ) the mensaje si show. in mode 8512 with two drives the mensaje is not show

[akeley]

Test version with h/V control .Please confirm if you think these settings are sufficient.

The horizontal alignment seems pretty even now, vertical could do with going a few pixels down, but since the H/W control works perfectly it's a non-issue.

Massive thanks for sorting this out, it's been bugging me slightly for nearly 5 years now. But the fact that there is always hope stuff like that might get fixed eventually is a great thing about MiSTer

The thing about 2 drives makes sense, I was just curious.

Hi @akeley can you give a few examples as I've not really noticed an inconvenience. I can then make a comparison

Well, it happens every time you mount a new disk and want it to boot. Then you need to go back to OSD and press Reset. For me, trying new games, it happens most of the time. I guess the current mode is useful if you play one multi disk game and need to juggle disks without booting them. Or when you use some productivity soft.

I've just realized you can simply press Ctrl+Alt+Alt to do standard MiSTer reset from keyboard, so it's not that big deal after all and maybe doesn't really need changing.

[EeDee]

@albconde thank you for taking this Core under your wing for some tweaking. @steddyman did a good job but maintenance and improvements are welcome.
Good observation re: drive line. I've had a look and it seems to be the drive status line. You can set a drive to side a: or b: so I'm guessing that with only one drive in the machine you can then keep track of the side you are currently on.

I've just realized you can simply press Ctrl+Alt+Alt to do standard MiSTer reset from keyboard, so it's not that big deal after all and maybe doesn't really need changing.

Yes and I had in mind that if the OSD stayed up you'd have to turn it off, hence why I didn't quite understand what you were meaning
[Edit]
When you exchange discs in a real machine reset works same as in the core.

@albconde what do you think of having a Video subdirectory to tidy up the main screen a little?