I would think that should be reported as a bug? I have not seen any mention of VGA being limited to 252, plus as you point out it will still happily work at 378 if you load an older, saved .opt file, I've just tried it. Petscii Robots works fine, only my Wii controller won't start, but keyboard operation is fine.
Harm, use option disk save "xyz" to save your current options and option disk load " xyz" to restore.  
Regards Kevin.
Edited 2023-12-19 00:44 by Bleep

First post in the 5.08.00 beta thread

  Quote  

I've limited the VGA version to 252MHz. Testing has shown memory contention between  the two cores at 378MHz can result in strange errors that are not present at slower speeds

Ok, fair enough.

  Bleep said  

... only my Wii controller won't start ...

Won't start how? and since when?

The current version requires you to uncomment the appropriate CTRL_DRIVER$ line at the beginning of robots.bas.

Best wishes,

Tom

Only if I run the CPU at 378, 252 is fine, Peter did say this would be the case in one of the release notes, that's why I was asking if there was any way of getting it to work at 378.
Regards Kevin
Edited 2023-12-19 00:58 by Bleep

Kevin,

I was puzzled that the RPi pico was advocated as 133MHz. And Peter seems to (reliably) run it at 2x that speed, or even 3x that speed.
There will be a caveat somewhere. If this chip would reliably run 378MHz, RPi would have marketted it at that speed, as that would have offset the chip from the ESP32 that is their prime competitor I guess.
I think we can be happy that the majority of the boards runs at 252MHz.

Volhout

No-one will ever need a clock faster than 133MHz. Just as no-0ne will ever need more than 640k of RAM. :)

It could be that early prototypes didn't run that much faster than 133MHz.

"Just as no-0ne will ever need more than 640k of RAM. :)"
LOL... I piggin remember that statement.. THEN!!  trying various ways to bolt more on for compatibility.

Ahh! the old days.

  MarkF said  

2) The intro music seems to repeat abruptly, i.e. the end of the music file doesn't 'gel' with the beginning (when the music repeats). Maybe the last 0.1 sec to 0.5 of the music file can be removed, so it repeats nicer.

the Intro song (Metal heads  (Title)) ends with a whole pattern, permanent lowering the Pitch of the "Lead Sound".
At the End of the pattern you get 4 beeps and some drumbeats to jump to pattern 4. what restarts the song. Everything stays in Tempo
This is how  Noelle Aman wrote the song
Edited 2023-12-21 02:50 by Martin H.

I'm trying to get the supporting code working on MMB4W to run Petscii like the CMM2. I'm struggling with one issue. Can someone give me an offset into the bin file for one of the images of the man and one of the images of one of the bridges - thanks

the Tile-Numbers should be like this

Edited 2023-12-21 03:53 by Martin H.

Thanks - now sorted. PETSCII running on both MMB4W and CMM2 with very minor changes that could be dealt with by a few IF MM.DEVICE$ statements

  Quote  

the Intro song (Metal heads  (Title)) ends with a whole pattern, permanent lowering the Pitch of the "Lead Sound".
At the End of the pattern you get 4 beeps and some drumbeats to jump to pattern 4. what restarts the song. Everything stays in Tempo
This is how  Noelle Aman wrote the song

Martin, thanks for checking  

Surprise...

The Aliexpress package arrived. I assembled a board, and blew up my first pico.
The LM1117T 3.3 are fakes. When correctly connected (the PCB=okay) they output 4.6V at 4.7V in.

I cut the 3V3 enable jumper, and am running the second pico now from it's internal switchmode regulator.

The audio noise is not as bad as I expected.

The petscii game runs. Currently running chess over night to see if it remains running. I was expecting problems with the 2 dollar pico's from China running at 252MHz, so I had some genuine ones in reserve.

But this one seems to run fine. I may check 378MHz with an older firmware, just to see if there is any margin.

Volhout

I have some black Pico clones that simply freeze if you put CPUSPEED much over 252. You have to nuke the flash and reinstall MMBasic to rescue them. Those are the YD-RP2040 with USB-C, 16MB flash and a WS LED. Fine for VGA as far as I can tell. :)

Bad news on the LM1117Ts....  :(

Hi Harm,
I've run 4 genuine Picos and 3 Chinese, not quite, copies, all of them have worked fine @ 378MHz :-) I did find that the switching regulator was significantly more noisy than an analogue, to the extent that I bypassed the switching with a linear, on my one VGA Pico that has sound, I did first try setting the switcher to low noise, which did help, but you couldn't keep it in low noise & run the Pico fast. :-(
Regards Kevin.

Attached, Petscii Robots, running on a GameMite, with a Wii Controller.



AND Petscii Robots, running PicoMiteVGA on a Picade. :-) I have added a new key mapping for the Picade controls for the game. :-)

Nice Kevin,

First time i hear of PI-cade. Guess you took the Pi4 out ?
Or did you use a different input to the monitor (VGA)?

Volhout

Hi Harm,
It's old now, from the original Kickstarter campaign for the Picade, so a Pi3. No that's still there, it's booting into the desktop, where I can run MAME or run up a terminal to connect to the Pico, which now sits alongside the Pi, luckily the screen driver has both HDMI & VGA inputs, as well as audio, so the sound even comes through the Picade speakers. :-) The Picade controls simply behave like keyboard input, hence the re-mapping I had to do.
Picadeomite
Thanks for all your hard work, not only on this but also the PIO.
Have a Great Christmas. Kevin.
Edited 2023-12-23 05:40 by Bleep

This is the release for Christmas 2023.

It is the same as the RC6 with 2 more minor bug fixes. So you don't need to do everything new. People that have modded RC5 or RC6, just keep it. The minor changes are cosmetic, not functional.

PETROBOT.zip

Merry Christmas all, and a happy new year.

Volhout

P.S. I have send the link to Martin's video to David, asked him for shipping the package (I had the kit and description ready), and his interest has gone (as some of you have predicted). So I have one surplus VGA kit.