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Robotron and Sinistar cores...

Posted: Sun Oct 03, 2021 4:20 am
by CartoonDonkey
Ran into a friend the other night at a retro games meetup, and he noted that the Robotron core likely uses his code, and that he'd improved upon it.
Perhaps this can be implemented into the Sinistar core as well, to fix the erm.. "frightening" high pitched voice of Sinistar himself that the current core exhibits.
Thought I’d have a look at the MiSTer source, and it appears they have incorporated my 6800 core fixes.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Arcade- ... 68.vhd#L63

Still sounded funny last night, but it was noisy and my ears are old and abused. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They’re using some of my *very* old code. My latest rewrite is here, and sounds great. ;-)

https://github.com/jboone/robotron-fpga-verilog

I was a little disappointed they’re not using the new stuff, and then I noticed, I never specified an open-source license for the new project! Oops. I need to fix that.

Re: Robotron and Sinistar cores...

Posted: Sun Oct 03, 2021 12:40 pm
by snoot
I had a quick look at this, I'm not familiar with verilog, but the files look more or less similar, aside from casing on 'ALL' and some whitespace.

I replaced the cpu68.vhd in the main MiSTer branch with the jboone one (https://github.com/jboone/robotron-fpga ... /cpu68.vhd) and compiled it, but couldn't tell any difference to the sound.

The sounds is pretty similar to that on the JROK board I have, I wouldn't call it particularly high pitched.

I know there were problems in the past with the core sound not being correct - here's an old video of Robotron showing the sound being higher pitched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PjqDMpEM5A, but it doesn't sound like that any more.

Is it the latest Robotron core you are running?
The emulation isn't perfect, it far more difficult than my JROK board even at difficulty zero for example, but I don't notice any issues with the sound.