Where Am I?
Fahrfall does screen updates during the vertical blanking interval. This provides for smooth, well timed, and glitch-free animation. Only the Apple IIe and later Apple II models provide hardware support for this sort of timing, but I don't think that is a major limitation. A bigger problem is that while the IIe, IIc, and IIgs all provide support for synchronizing to the vertical blanking interval, they each do so in a slightly different (and incompatible) manner. In order to run on all of these Apple II machines, Fahrfall needs to be able to figure out which kind of machine is running it and to adapt accordingly.
Fortunately, it is not too difficult to identify the host machine. In fact, a pertinent Apple Technical Note ("Apple II Family Identification") is readily available on the Internet. Executing a simple ROM routine quickly identifies whether or not a IIgs is in use. If not a IIgs, then a couple of additional memory accesses to known ROM locations quickly distinguish between the IIc, the IIe, and older machines as well. All that remains is to make use of this information.
A single bit within the IIe indicates whether or not vertical blanking is active, so the IIe code simply polls that bit. The bit value for active vertical blanking is reversed on the IIgs, so a complimentary routine is provided for use on the IIgs. On the IIc the vertical blanking indication is tied to an interrupt source, so the IIc routine instead checks for an active interrupt and clears the interrupt source before returning. An indirect jump through a pointer in memory is used to choose the appropriate vertical blank synchronization routine at runtime. This should be sufficient to enable Fahrfall to support all of the later members of the Apple II family.
The older II and II Plus are also detected during Fahrfall initialization. Lacking any support for vertical blank synchronization, detection of these early Apple II machines currently leads to an early exit from Fahrfall. When Fahrfall is more complete, I may experiment with a more static delay loop for use on these early machines. It won't be perfect, but it might be better than not running at all? Alternatively, it looks like the mouse interface card might be able to provide the necessary timing (if one is installed). Are there enough II or II Plus machines (with or without mouse cards) to make the effort to support those machines worthwhile? I have no idea...
Read The Fine Manual
Most programming of Apple II hardware is done through some sort of "soft switch" access. These are memory-mapped hardware registers that change and/or reflect the state of various bits of hardware on the Apple II. Most "soft switches" are accessed in such a way that the change of state occurs based on the location accessed rather than whether that access is a read or a write. However, "most" and "all" are different things...
The vertical blanking interval detection routine for the Apple IIc enables generation of a vertical blanking interrupt, but disables interrupts at the CPU. The interrupt is detected by polling a "soft switch" until the vertical blanking interval is indicated. During setup, another set of "soft switch" locations is accessed to enable the generation of that interrupt. But when I first ran Fahrfall on a IIc, the program simply hung.
I speculated that my polling loop was checking for the wrong condition, so I changed it to look for a '0' rather than a '1'. That stopped Fahrfall from hanging, but now the game ran too fast as it always thought an interrupt was pending. Ultimately, I figured out that my attempt to enable vertical blanking interrupt generation with read operations was not working. Changing those to write operations made the interrupt detection work as expected. Sometimes it pays to read the manual carefully!
Hear Me Roar
One of my favorite bits of Fahrfall on the CoCo is the simple sound effect used to simulate footfalls during player movement on the platforms. This effect uses the square wave audio output on the CoCo, following a pattern triggered during the vertical blanking interval. The Apple II audio hardware is similar to the square wave audio hardware on the CoCo, so I implemented an equivalent audio pattern triggered during the vertical blanking period while the player is moving horizontally on a platform. The sound effect on the Apple II sounds virtually identical to the effect on the CoCo version of Fahrfall. Fahrve still looks like a big, blue box, but now you can hear him coming!
I guess that covers the state of things for now. Hopefully I can find some time this weekend to add scoring, or to give Fahrve some shape, or... Well, I guess you'll just have to stay tuned!
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