Anonymous
User login
Please support the defense of Ukraine.
Direct or via Unclutter App
Active forum topics
Recent content
Navigation
No Ads.
No Trackers.
No Social Media.
All Content Locally Hosted.
Built on Free Software.
We have complied with zero government requests for information.
I just wanted to quickly say thanks to CVT for including me in the initial group to buy this card.
It is fantastic and I can only see it getting more amazing as people experiment with it. I couldnt stop grinning when I saw Doom running on my old apple ii plus.
Not what I got it for, but it still amazed me. Love the styling of it too. Despite the ESP32 sitting on it, its still giving off Retro vibes.
I'm really busy at work at the moment and I cant play with this card anywhere near as much as I would like. I know there is so much for me to learn with it.
The firmware updating process was an absolute dream to use. Went without a hitch.
Very keen to explore it more. I'd like to learn about communicating between the apple ii and the esp32 softcard.
Anyway...all in good time. Thanks again ! A couple of weeks time, I'm going to have lots of dumb questions ;)
Cheers
Dave
I finally got the 32GB Micro SD card I ordered (USPS lost my package but eventually found it aparently).
I've been playing with the ESP32 card for a bit now... all I can say is WOW! Very impressive. The only issue I've run into so far is the Mac emulator doesn't seem to have vhold on the monitor setup I have, but I suspect that it is the NTSC->HDMI converter because I've run into that with some clones and 80 column cards too. I will have to give it a try with a different video display setup and I bet it will work fine.
But DOOM and NES and other things all seem to work great. Really cool to see this stuff running.
I am really happy to see that everyone is enjoying it!
Now to address the V-hold issue of the Macintosh emulator: for this to work a CRT monitor is needed, preferably with external V-hold and V-size pots. This is because the vertical size needs to be reduced to fit 350 lines and the vertical hold needs to be adjusted for 44 FPS. Below is the shortest explanation that I could write on why this is needed:
The native resolution of the Macintosh Classic is 512x342 pixels. However the standard 60 FPS non-interlaced NTSC gives a total of only 262 lines. PAL's refresh rate is 50 FPS, so it can do slightly better and render 315 lines, however this is still not enough. To accommodate the Mac's vertical resolution of 342 pixels, 350 lines are needed: 342 visible + 8 for synchronization. So the ESP32 SoftCard does this by reducing the refresh rate down to 43.75 FPS:
262 lines x 60 FPS = 315 lines x 50 FPS = 360 lines x 43.75 FPS = 15.750 kHz
The frequency 15.750 kHz is called the Horizontal Scan Rate and for composite CRT monitors it is usually between 15.625 kHz and 15.750 kHz. It is a hardware limitation of the composite CRT monitors and it effectively limits the maximum vertical resolution for a particular refresh rate. (This is also the reason why a 32 kHz monitor is needed for VGA's 640x480 resolution and why it cannot be achieved using NTSC or PAL.)
Most modern LCD displays/HDMI converters cannot accommodate 44 FPS, while all retro CRT monitors that I have tested with can. Because it is fairly close to the PAL’s 50 FPS, for PAL monitors it’s even possible to find a sweet spot for the V-hold that syncs both 50 and 44 FPS. The V-size still needs to be adjusted though.
Thanks for the explanation of the Mac monitor issue. I will try it with one of my 9" B&W NTSC monitors.
I was able to get it to work on my 9" Electrohome monitor but I did have to adjust vertical hold and horizon height / width to make it look right. Pretty impressive considering where it's all eminating from.
I think this card is the best product of 2023 for the Apple II IMO. Can't wait to see new updates or the next version, should it happen.
Very interested in playing around with this card. Is the intention to sell these cards only on ebay? or are you going to distribute another way?
Very cool project and thanks!
It works with one of my 9" B&W monitors. I need to find and plug in one of my mice to be able to do anything with it of course.
Still pretty cool to see it boot up though.
I have done most of the work to port the ESP32 SoftCard Video Converter to Linux and MacOS, but I'm not sure what files to use to test it. Can I just download any old .mp4 file or what does it need?
I had to remove some Windows proprietaryness (tchar) that didn't seem to be needed anyway to make the code compile. The code also had CRs and a lot of NULLs that needed to be removed before the GNU compiler would compile it without warnings. I made a simple Makefile and provided instructions on how to install ffmpeg on Ubuntu or MacOS. Installing that on other OSes/distros shouldn't be too hard. I also converted the DOS batch files to BASH scripts which should work on just about any *NIX-like system.
Once I can test it I will upload the code back to here so anyone else who wants to can use it in the spirit of giving back a little.
Wow! Thanks for doing this!
The Video Converter should work on any video format that FFmpeg can handle, which means pretty much everything. Often I use sites like this one to download videos I like directly from YouTube: https://ssyoutube.com/en122dW/youtube-video-downloader
I also asked ChatGPT to convert the batch files to shell scripts for MacOS, but I didn’t get a chance to test them: https://chat.openai.com/share/35848e66-38c7-441b-a8eb-098f1da35241
The ChatGPT output doesn't really look all that terribly different than what I've come up with on first glance. I'll have to take a closer look later.
Here is the Linux and MacOS port of the Video Converter as I promised. Sorry it took so long, I had to upgrade my Macbook Pro to Ventura to test it because brew quit working on Mojave due to it being too old.
I merged in my version of the BASH scripts with the ones from ChatGPT above and I had to make a few more changes to the C++ code to make it work, mainly to fix the path separators to / (like god intended) instead of \.
I've tested it on Ubuntu as well. Included with the C++ code is a Makefile and there are compiling and installation instructions as well as instructions on how to install G++ and ffmpeg if necessary. If anyone needs help on a RHEL/CentOS/Fedora or whatever let me know I can probably figure it out.
Awesome and thanks!
I was also able to compile your version of VideoIndexer.cpp in Xcode on my Hackintosh and I just needed to add one #include <stdlib.h> on top for the abs() function.
Interesting. G++ doesn't seem to need that on either Mac or Linux. I have added that #include to my version, even it doesn't seem to make a difference. It can't really hurt. I can re-upload a new zip file or you can if you have XCode project files or something. I could install XCode on my Macbook Pro I suppose. I haven't used XCocde in years and last time I did it was for Objective-C code for Mac native GUI apps. My previous two jobs I had company supplied Macs but the coding was mostly all in Java using either Eclipse or IntelliJ. When I do C++ I usually don't use an IDE at all although I have used Eclipse in the past, mostly for projects originally developed by someone else who used that. Oh, in one case I did some C++ using Android Studio, but it was code called from Java using JNI.
I don't think there is a need to re-upload anything else and the include would be pretty easy to figure out. Besides the Xcode I have is really old too (version 5) and from what I remember in those days Apple loved to brake backwards compatibility in almost every new release, so my project file will most likely not work with newer versions of Xcode. My Hackintosh is from 2013-2014 and it cannot be updated.
I have a 2013-ish iMac which can't be updated anymore either. Unfortuantely it's now not all that useful for anything other than controlling my AppleSauce box since neither Firefox nor Chrome support that old of a version of MacOS anymore and the old browsers don't work with most web sites any more because of the encryption in them being deprecated. Safari on that machine kinda-sorta works for some things, but not very well. A lot of sites won't work with that old of a Safari either and a lot of sites don't work all that well even with current Safari.
My Macbook Pro is a 2017 model, so it is still supported, but I suspect only for a short period of time now. I would expect Apple won't offer OS upgrades past maybe the next version or two, and within a couple years it will have similar issues to what the iMac I have has.
I don't know for certain because I don't have Windows but it appears from what I read that Chrome and Firefox are or will soon be dropping support for versions of Windows prior to 10. And 10 is as I understand it pretty much unusable on many older PCs, so the problem of older hardware support doesn't seem to be exclusively an Apple issue. Even for Linux at some point older hardware becomes a problem not always support but often performance, albeit there are stripped down distros which will run on very mimalistic configurations, albeit often not very fast or with limited features compared to modern setups.
Anyway, I'm downloading the current version of XCode on my Macbook Pro, so I can take a look at it. I've occasionally had a recruiter ping me about MacOS or iOS software development roles so it wouldn't be bad to at least have some recent familiatiry with it. In any case, the instructions I provided for installing the command line GNU compiler and building with that should work on most Macs if they have a brew package manager that works or G++ and ffmpeg already installed. If brew is b0rk3d like mine was on the older MacOS, then it might be necessary to download and install those tools manually. If anyone runs into that I can probably help out as I've got a ton of experience porting stuff to and from old systems. I wouldn't be surprised if any x86 Macs prior to 2015-ish aren't broken these days. And almost surely all PPC and even more so 68k Macs probably would have to be all done by hand. Of course 68k Macs won't run the NeXTStep based MacOSX at all to begin with although some models supported A/UX, Apple's previous *NIX OS. That was pretty rare and unusual. Porting anything to the "classic" MacOS is a whole different story.
Pretty much all of that is probably academic because I doubt very many are seriously using Macs older than 2015 for much these days and don't have some more recent machine they could use.
While watching an unrelated video from Adrian’s Digital Basement, I found out something that I didn’t know before: a lot of old North American CRT monitors and TVs actually support NTSC-50. Adrian explains that he has done extensive testing on a variety of different CRT monitors and TVs and he has found that most do support it: https://youtu.be/bak-MePFsJ0?t=1572
The advantage of NTSC-50 is the ability to have color graphics with 320x240 resolution (same as PAL), instead of the regular NTSC’s 320x200. And since one of my CRT TVs supports this standard and allows me to test it, I decided to add it in the latest firmware. Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, the Video player and the game console emulators all support color 320x240 for PAL and now also for NTSC-50.
Firmware Update:
Here is the latest firmware update that add NTSC-50 and a couple of other fixes:
ESP32 SoftCard FW v.1.04.zip
Version History: (Continued)
v1.04
- Added the NTSC-50 composite video standard (320x240) for older NTSC color CRT TVs and monitors. To switch, just type NTSC-50.
- Video Player: fixed a crash when trying to play an unconverted video or an MP3 placed in the /Videos directory.
- Command prompt: Hitting <TAB> now cycles back to the first command, instead of just stopping at the last.
Some people might even prefer NTSC-50 over PAL, as it provides different pros and cons from PAL.
For example in PAL there is very little color artifacting, but some vertical lines look jagged due to the way PAL alternates lines:
PAL.png
In NTSC-50 (and regular NTSC) there is color artifacting (look at the word SOFTWARE), but the vertical lines are smooth:
NTSC-50.png
Very interesting. I will download the new version and give it a try later today. I wonder if NTSC -> HDMI converters support NTSC-50. Guess we will find out, at least for the one I have handy. I have a couple of different ones. I wi also try with a little 20" Emerson 720P LCD TV that has NTSC input and maybe one of the 9" B&W NTSC monitors I have around my desk. The latter won't show the colors obviously but the extra lines of resolution should work if the monitor supports it.
I've had surprisingly good luck... fingers crossed for you.
Btw, here are some more demo videos (downloaded and converted from YouTube) that are good for testing the aspect ratio and sound for the different standards: https://www.wifi-tracker.net/my/MoreDemoVideos.zip
If the one I usually use with a //e doesn't work I have a couple others I can try. I have noticed some work better than others, especially with 80 columns from ][+ 80 column cards. The //e seems to generate better output and the IIgs better yet.
No bueno on the first NSTC->HDMI converter doing NTSC-50, I just get a blue "NO SIGNAL" screen. I will try another one later and the other monitors.
Project Update: Sega Genesis
Unfortunately the Sega Genesis emulator will not make it at this point. I ported it and got it running, but only at half speed at best. Initially I was hoping that I was just doing something stupid, but after some time tinkering with it I could not make it run any faster. Looks like the ESP32 is simply not fast enough to emulate a 16-bit game console at full speed. And it’s a real shame too, because the graphics are so much better than the 8-bit Sega Master System:
Sonic1.JPG
Sonic2.JPG
MKII.JPG
The fact that you tried is pretty epic, and appreciated.
Sorry if already covered but does SMS emulation allow for / mean we could use SG-1000 / SC-3000 games or SC-3000 BASIC?
I’ll have to take a look. Right now the UI only displays .sms ROMs, so you can’t even run an .sm file. However I downloaded a couple of SG-1000 .sm ROMs and renamed them to .sms and they do run, but there is no video, just sound. However from the sound I can tell they are running correctly and the controls work. It might be an easy fix.
Maybe in the future you might consider designing a board using the same ideas as your ESP32 board but using a more powerful chipset... Maybe something based on ARM like the STM32H7? You would probably be able to emulate a lot more powerful systems. Possibly Espressif might also eventually come out with a more powerful successor to the ESP32 as well that might more easily adapt to your design, much like the ESP32 followed the earlier ESP8266.
An idea I had as well is whether it might be possible to generate RGB output instead of NTSC or PAL through similar techniques. Maybe SCART or VGA? That might get around some of the resolution limitations and allow color at higher resolutions like 640x480.
This board has really proven that the possibilities are nearly endless.
What emulator did you use/port? AFAIK the Genesis VDP is backwards compatible with SMS, but not with SG1000. But the SMS VDP is backwards compatible with SG1000. This sounds like whatever emulator you are using is emulating the genesis VDP and not the SMS VDP. Just a wild guess based on how I understand the different VDPs work.
No, I wasn't using the Sega Genesis emulator I was showing in post #123 (based on Gwenesis) to try the SG1000 ROMs. I was using the Sega Master System emulator that is already part on the ESP32 SoftCard and is based on SMS Plus. It doesn't mention anything about SG-1000 ROMs, but they definitely run, since I can hear the sound in Space Invaders when I fire. It looks like the video buffer is somewhere else in memory, but it might be more complicated than that, like no VDP at all.
Throwing out ideas for the ESP32 Card... Though I'm unable to code it.
"Stock Price Ticker". Would be a great addition to the card. Sharing the idea. :-)
I’ve got something else cooking right now, that could do that and much more, but I don’t want to give it away until I am sure it will make it into the firmware.
If your converter has component inputs, you should try connecting it to the Y-input. I have an old North American Sony Bravia LCD TV from 2007 that accepts only standard NTSC at 60 Hz through the composite input. However if I feed the signal through the Y-Component, not only does it work with NTSC-50 and PAL, but it can also sync the Mac emulator, which is at 45 Hz. Unfortunately this TV doesn't allow me to change the vertical size, so the top and bottom lines are cut:
Mac on Sony Bravia.JPG
Of course through the Y-Component it is monochrome only.
Sony Bravia Y-Component.JPG
Btw, has anyone tried the card on an Apple IIgs? People are asking me and I have never owned or even seen one in real life.
I am willing to try it, as long as you promise me within reason there's no risk of anything physically blowing up :P However I am travelling for work next week, so unless I find time over the next day or two, it may take me a week or two to get to trying it. I also want to try it in my Laser 128 while I'm at it anyway.
The Apple IIgs is backwards compatible with the Apple II/II+/IIe when it comes to expansion cards, so nothing will blow up as a result of pin mismatching. The only consideration is the available power, as the ESP32 SoftCard is a bit on the power-hungry side of the spectrum, so I suggest not to try with the machine full of other cards.
Here is the current that various cards I own draw from the 5V rail:
CFFA3000 Card + MicroSD Adapter + USB drive: 500 mA
Apple Mouse Interface Card + Mouse: 280 mA
Apple Disk ][ Interface Card + Floppy: 260 mA (doesn't matter if the floppy is reading/writing or not)
Z80 Card (clone): 250 mA
Taxan RGB II Card: 250 mA
ESP32 SoftCard: 190 mA
Printer Interface Card: 150 mA
Apple 64K AUX memory/80 col card: 120 mA
ProDOS ROM-Drive Card: 50 mA
MultiROM card: 30 mA
Dan ][ Controller: 10 mA
No worries power wise, appreciate the measurements. All my II series machines that have lots of cards already have replacement power supplies installed.
I'll see if I am able to test before I leave town.
I have a IIgs. I could pull it out later and try the ESP32 Softcard in it. No reason to think it wouldn't work exactly as it does in my //e. Since the card is generating its own video and the IIgs bus timing is designed to be compatible with the 8 bit Apple II family I can't see any reason it would fail.
The card was briefly presented in Adrian's Digital Basement's latest YT video. A viewer "from Bulgaria" sent it. Well, surprise, surprise... who could that be??? :))))) Well done! He liked the card a lot - and announced to make a separate longer video about it. Also features this thread of the AppleFritter forum... Again, well done. Adrian has quite a large audience. This will certainly bring some attention to this cool project...
https://youtu.be/0u6I_VAO22A?feature=shared&t=1692
Awesome! I will have to check that out!. Pretty cool to see AF be represented on a highly viewed YT channel.
Pretty cool... you can see a couple of my posts on this thread as he scrolls by!!!
Wow! I didn’t see this until now, as I have been super busy assembling, programming, testing and shipping cards due to a weird eBay spike. Now it makes sense. I didn’t realize that even Adrian's second channel can have such an impact!
I have been a huge fan of his channel and I sent him one card from the initial early adopter batch of 10 and I am super glad that I did!
I came across this forum after watching Adrian's recent brief review of this card.
I am very interested in acquiring/building this card so would like to know where I can purchase a built one or where I can get the Gerbers to get one (or 5) built ?
This card would make my Apple IIe much more useful
Thank you,
Wayne Bushby
Welcome!As the post above yours indicated, more cards are being made. I would stay tuned here or watch his eBay store https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?item=256193370793&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562&_ssn=ivor1876 (you may be able to snag one!)
If that already caused a spike then fasten your seatbelts for when he does a full review on his main channel... :D
Yes, it is pretty awesome. He has a lot of viewers.
This card definitely deserves a lot of attention though. This and the Dan ][ which has gotten a lot of interest here lately are some of the coolest new cards to come out for the Apple II in the past couple years.
I think the ESP32 card is just scratching the surface. I think Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64/128 and maybe even CP/M and possibly MSX emulators are possible. Possible an IBM PC/XT level MS-DOS emulator.
If not with the ESP32, possibly using a similar design using a faster microcontroller like the ARM based ones... Cortex M4 maybe. Possibly even adding a 2nd microcontroller and just using the ESP32 for the video generation maybe. So much potential.
Just a small correction of the eBay link, as the item id should not be included,
since it changes all the time: https://www.ebay.com/usr/ivor1876
Thanks for this! I think the only bump I ran into is filenames with spaces caused an issue. Renaming the video without any space worked.
In "VideoIndexer/Go.sh":
for file in $(ls); doshould be
for file in *; doThe word list returned by the command substitution
$(ls)is split on every space, not on the actual file names.I despise spaces in filenames... They definitely can futz up the operation of scripts unless carefully programmed around.
First I want to thank skate323k137 once again, this time for doing some really extensive testing on his Laser 128 machine and discovering a really strange bug, which is the reason for this firmware update.
It turns out that for some reason the mouse X-axis gets inverted on the Laser 128. This only happens for the ESP32 SoftCard. Other Apple II programs like MousePaint or Apple II DeskTop work fine. I have no idea why this is happening, but I am adding to the firmware the ability to invert the X-axis or the Y-axis (or both) using the MOUSE command. From inside the mouse calibration screen, hitting <X> or <Y> toggles the axis inversion.
Here is the latest firmware update:
ESP32 SoftCard FW v.1.06.zip
Version History: (Continued)
v1.05
- SEGA/Nintendo emulators: Fixed the incorrect sound frequency in NTSC-50
v1.06
- Mouse: Added the ability to invert the X-axis or Y-axis of the mouse using the MOUSE command
- SD Card: The SYSTEM command now also shows the number of sectors and the sector size of the SD card
Thank you, CVT, for the fix to this puzzling issue. I can confirm it's working on real hardware as expected. Here is a photo for the folks interested; I am using a bus expansion from A2Heaven which provides slots 5 and 7. A slot for the ESP32 SoftCard and a slot for the TJBoldt Rom Drive to boot the SoftCard (I could use a floppyemu instead, but these ROM drive cards are fast and cheap to build).
20230830_143816.jpg
I really like your setup! You should get a CRT though. There is something retro-magical about them and low-res stuff looks a lot better. Here is that same frame from Wolf3D on a CRT TV in NTSC. PAL or NTSC-50 looks even better, but let's be 1:1 fair. :)
Wolf3D Frame.png
The LCD is just for my test area, that desk sees multiple computers in a week sometimes. It is acceptable for upscaled composite, but the xrgb2+ fares better with analog RGB or even s-video. But it's scanline settings and lack of lag make it passable. Without going into full detail I can hook nealy any signal to this monitor that my 8 bit computers can generate (albeit with help of scalers or transcoders). In the basement is where the Laser128's real monitor lives, a 27 inch NEC dual sync monitor as seen here with digital TTL RGB. I also have a PVM20M4U I use, but it would fold this desk in half I'm afraid. I have one nice black and white CRT that is small enough to sit nicely on Apple IIs, but that's about the only tube (compact macs aside) that gets used in my office anymore.
20221217_175330.jpg
Pages