BBC News Video Short titled: “What's on the far side of theMoon?”

Is the answer “more moon?”

Yeah, it’s all slowly coming back to me.

a man is dancing in a living room in front of a fireplace . Alt: a man is happy dancing in a living room in front of a fireplace .

Imagine being cut off from all of humanity for 40 minutes….

Currently glued to the TV watching some people just being very far away.

a group of black and white cows are sitting on a table with the words okay one last time written below them Alt: Father Ted using some toy cows to explain close and far away.

Artemis II coverage on the news this evening.

Yeah, TTF support was a game changer.

It runs just sweet and does what I need it to do on a 16Mhz 386 with 4MB of RAM and fits nicely on a 40MB hard drive.

No, I think you nailed it tbh.

No smoke without fire.

...and it still caught them out on occasions. Damn you IEEE 754.

That's the best kind of find. If you think there's anything significant on them, and the floppies look in reasonable condition, may be worth investing in a USB floppy drive. I picked one up on eBay for about a fiver.

Yeah, to be honest, I'm still smarting today.

Me doing graduate training:

"You know how computers are supposed to be able to accurately do calculations..."

Definitely went downhill from that point onwards.

I got this with Muse when the kids were doing drumming lessons. “Oh it’s some old music that’s on the curriculum”.

It sounds plausible.

Once it was going it could go full tilt.

It was to be honest. Running at 4Mhz if memory serves. Normally the music would get a tiny slice, maybe 5 or 10 raster lines worth. When I told Tim he could have more or less all of the time we decided to go for broke and used as much as we needed. It was well worth it.

The 68000 is always the master. The game I was writing was even more complicated as it was on the MegaCD and we still wanted some chip tunes.

- MegaCD - ran all the game code and MegaCD specific stuff
- MegaDrive - just did sprites and scrolling
- Z80 - just did the music

When a game needs to start/change a tune or play an FX it does the following:

1. Hold the Z80
2. Write two bytes (cmd + data) to a couple of memory locations in the Z80 memory space
3. Release the Z80 - it recognises the change of cmd and actions it, then carries on.

The gap is imperceptible.

Just checked - it looks like the Z80 needs to be held in a reset state for the 68000 to access its memory. So my driver does this:

1. Hold the Z80
2. Send the music driver and data across
3. Release the Z80 - it runs

I don’t recall exactly how the MegaDrive does it, but remember it being very straightforward.

On other systems it runs a slice every vertical blank interrupt say, and takes a small amount of the 50th (or 60th) of a second for that game frame.

Yeah something like that, though it also needs to do some wibbly wobbly bits like vibrato and ADSR on each channel, those are set up in the driver and run one step at a time every time the driver is called. It doesn't need to wait for the game on the Megadrive, the Z80 is just for sound.

Okay BlueSky Hive Mind, what's the best Megadrive/Genesis emulator to use to debug sound? I would like to be able to see in detail what the FM and PSG chips are doing, and single-step the Z80 if possible.

BlueSky seems to be having hiccups at the moment.

Yeah, was all a bit weird. I've no idea why it would fail.

The biggest surprise when trawling through the code was to discover it also supported the PSG sound chip. Isn't that the one that's in the Master System? So there's a possibility I could port this to that. Tim and Geoff didn't use the PSG bit, probably because the YM2612 is so nice to work with.

Yeah, I keep looking at some code I wrote for DOS years ago, sprite and vector primitives, and wondering whether I could cobble something together. I mean, how hard could it be?

Very much so, though DOS6.22 introduced memmaker which did a fairly good job of rewriting the configs to shove stuff up in high memory. It's my daily runner on an old 386 I have.