SmartBASIC - A Coleco Adam Forum

Here's a complete bitmap package for the Turbo Pascal 3 compiler under CP/M which will allow you to take advantage of the Adam's graphic capabilities using the power of a compiled Pascal environment. I’d like to play around with this on my Adam. Wmaalouli could you please post the source code for t...

So I tried to use the Windows version and I'm getting nowhere with it.
Sargon was the only disk image that worked, otherwise I get the typewriter screen or more commonly just a black screen in NTSC mode...
Not sure what I'm missing here.

joltguy wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 01, 2020 2:09 pm

Does this mean that more than 4 sprites can't appear at the same y-coordinate regardless of what their x-coordinate is?

Exactly. You can easily test this out. Some games actually make use of this limitation as a "feature"

One limitation of the 9918 VDP is that you can only have 4 sprites on a single row. Additional ones will not be displayed. So when you are programming with sprites, you need to make sure that situation does not occur.

If you use assembly then you have very little constraints under CP/M. Also you have the option of using Turbo Pascal with the graphics, sound and controller extensions I developed for it, thus giving you a powerful development tool which is very easy to work with. Finally CP/M is a full OS with matu...

Interesting. I don't recall this issue occuring under emulation, only on real hardware. I used Virtual Adam for development and testing.

Yup, this happens sometimes and is related to timing issues with VDP port communication. It's very random and solved by resetting the computer. I have not found a solution to that because it seems to be a hardware issue....

Would you be interested in converting this to use an 80 column card? I'm not sure it would be worth the effort given that 80 column cards are not prevalent. Also since this is CP/M based, it would require a patched CP/M version for 80 column as well. As far as I can tell, there is very little devel...

Please post your PS design when done here. It would be great to have an alternative option should the PS in my printer die...

Is this project an academic exercise or is the PS in the printer prone to malfunction?
As for the printer itself, aside from being loud, it's also quite slow. But frankly, neither of these is a major issue for me as compared to the lack of a tractor feed...