From: Christopher Phillips (shrydar_at_jaruth.com)
Date: 2007-11-07 14:25:20
On 07/11/2007, at 16:58 , Marko Mäkelä wrote:
> Christopher Phillips (are you here?), who gave me the final
> spark to implement the C2N232, mentioned to me that he implemented a
> multi-computer scrolltext where the computers were connected via
> joystick ports.
I'm here. John West did something similar the previous year - After
being impressed with the concept and the fact he'd actually done it,
I then nitpicked about the lack of raster-bars and colours and was
given the standard UCC response of "bring code!".
My implementation was initially intended to sent actual characters or
possibly a tick per character across the joyports, but at the end of
the day I just sent a reset-message signal from the first c64 to the
second shortly after the first character of the scroll had exited the
screen. (too many issues with repeated or missing chars on the second
machine otherwise).
It's a little dangerous connecting joyports directly - I fried a CIA
or two before I gave up on that technique altogether. Perhaps
someone a little more hardware savvy than I could design some simple
protection from some passive componants?
As for uses, it would be interesting to see if there could be any
time saved on 3d rendering. I'm guessing that the rasterising would
best be done on the machine doing the displaying (unless you're doing
a low res char mode render across a grid of screens!), but there
could well be some merit in having a number of non-display machines
taking turns providing 2d coordinates of endpoints, post 3d
transform, clipping, and perhaps even hidden surface removal.
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