moa/docs/log.txt

[Note: until the dashed line is logs pieced together after the fact]

Project Start
=============

- 2021-09-28: started the project, computie monitor working after a week
- 2021-10-08: I think the Computie OS could boot by this point
- 2021-10-14: I think I started working on the genesis at this point, or maybe a bit before
- 2021-10-20: added frontend refactoring
- 2021-10-25: added Sega Genesis peripherals for the first time, even though I think I had been
  working on it for at least a couple weeks by that point
- 2021-10-27: added minifb frontend
- 2021-11-01 to 2021-11-11: worked on the Z80/TRS-80
- 2021-11-13: was working on Mac (and Genesis a bit)
- 2021-11-28: took up the Genesis again after posting first article


Genesis
=======

before 2021-10-25
- controllers and coproc controls aren't an issue as dummies until much later
- implement dma
- try implementing the scrolls and get nothing
- try printing just the patterns and get nothing
- cram is 0s, fight and find a few dma/transfer bugs
- cram is then sorta working, getting 0xeee and 0xee0 colours, but showing as pink
- turns out to be index issue into cram, fixing makes colours ok, but still nothing on screen


2021-10-25
- still nothing on the screen.
- maybe it's not working because I haven't implemented the h/v blanking bits at all, so I add
  them and it makes something appear instead of blackness.  At least for Sonic 2, it waits
  for the vblank bit to be set

2021-10-26
- what caused those pink screens I was initialling getting?!?  there was an issue with the cram
  not being correct, and I remember fighting a ton with that...
- it was caused by the cram being byte-wise, but the index into the array when fetching the
  colour was not multiplied by 2, so the colours were wrong.  It was fixed in commit 109ae4d

- add the BusPort thing to fix issues with how data is written.  Some writes can bet 4 bytes, or
  2 bytes, and they could be to the same address or the adjacent address, so adding BusPort,
  which breaks up the reads into all 2 bytes reads as the real hardware would see simplifies
  the number of cases to deal with when accepting data on the VDP ports

2021-10-27
- oct. 27, commit 109ae4d doesn't seem to work and it seems to be related to the interrupts not,
  which I got working in the immediately following commit.  It actually does work but is super
  slow to display anything, which was fixed later, as in minutes before the screen goes white
  to display the sega logo.  The interrupt print log is very slow, only a few interrupts in a
  minute

2021-10-29
- the next commit 250c0 speeds things up by making the step function occur less often for the vdp
  Also this commit adds code to change the interrupt mask, but only if a hardware interrupt occurs
  I think this was causing problems with the computie binaries.  There's still an int bug

- commit 93c080e: finally fix interrupts properly.  The code I was using before didn't properly
  reset the interrupt signal, so it couldn't reoccur.  The CPU now checks the interrupt controller
  each cycle for a pending interrupt, rather than relying on a callback and the Interruptable trait
  which I partially removed.
- it now actually runs and shows the screens at a reasonable speed

- I recall there was an issue with the pattern indexing using the wrong formula to calculate, and
  that caused some of the issues


-----------------------------

2021-10-31
- at this point I had finally gotten the scrolls to work enough to print the SEGA logo at the start

2021-11-01
- started working on the Z80 and TRS-80 implementations, as well as debugging the Mac stuff, which
  I think I was doing for most of November (instead of working on the Genesis impl)


Macintosh
=========

- ram self test is run by jumping to 0x400694, which returns by jumping to %a6 which contains 0x4000f0
  if it returns with eq set, it will jump to the system initialization at 0x40026c
  it doesn't have eq set, so it ends up in an infinite loop.
- turns out MOVEM was broken such that it was incrementing instead of decrementing address (found by
  inspecting the first byte of memory when trying to get 0x5555AAAA to cancel itself out

2021-11-19
- still not working, calling 0x4000f0 to fail.  Turns out this is where the dead mac is supposed to
  be printed, but it's not (found that from another blog post)

2021-11-23
- finally got dead mac screen showing with 0F0003 as the error.  It wasn't showing because the 0 colour
  used by the genesis, which is a mask colour, causes nothing to appear
- then the issue was the indexing of the memory page (x * 2) * y instead of (x * 2) + (y * 512/8)

- so the 0F0003 dead mac was caused by the first trap instruction in the ROM, appearing at 4002adc
  It causes an illegal instruction, which then jumps to the exception entry points start at 4001aa
  in rom which all jump to the same function at 4001d2, which then ends up in the failure
- trying to find why, i traced the program to find where the trap table was being set up, which
  turned out to be around 400448 which is where I'd been debugging the last issue.  It sets location
  0x28 to 401018 which is the trap handler...
- 0x28 is not the illegal instruction handler, it's the 1010 line emulator exception... 1010 as it A
  as in the A line traps... So the m68k is specifically not handling the a000 instructions correctly

- it's now getting past the dead mac, but instead it causes two writes to read only memory when it
  tries to set some bits indirectly to an address in rom (0x4034ae), which is something do with the
  drivers. The Sound and Disk drivers are opened and it's during each of the open functions that the
  write occurs
- it's possible to continue (which might be in broken state) and it then attempts to write to
  sequential addresses in upper ram which eventually spills over into 0x100000 which isn't mapped...
  No idea if this is just because of something going wrong earlier, or if this is also an emulator bug

- the writes to rom issues happens during InitIO (0x400614), when initializing the first two drivers,
  the Sound and Disk (I think).  There is a pointer to a pointer to a value that contains 0x4034ae,
  which seems to be calculated from a jump table, presumably pointing to something in rom that contains
  the driver, but for some reason the code is bit setting that value.  I'm not sure if the data is wrong
  and it should normally see a 0 instead of the rom addr, or if there's a branch that shouldn't/should
  happen that leads it to that code when it shouldn't
- c4c and c7c seem to be driver descriptors of some kind, each with a rom addr and what seems to be some
  flags after that.  They also have 0xfffb and 0xfffc.  That said, if there's a bug in the code that
  creates that data, it would likely be broken for both


Back to Genesis
===============

2021-11-30
- after getting things working somewhat with the scrolls, but not the sprites, I finally found
  ComradeOj's demo, which I'm now using to test with, and I've also got BlastEm setup so that I
  can compile the code and modify it to print out all of vram so that I can verify against mine

- there is a difference in VRAM in the patterns section with non-zero data starting at VRAM:0020
  the first differing byte is VRAM:0046 which is 0x1111 in my VDP but 0x0000 in blastem's VDP
- checked what data was actually being transferred to VRAM, the source data is in ram at 0xff2000
  (ie. 0xff2000 is copied to VRAM:0020 for some number of bytes, maybe 256 or so)
- ram copy of data is incorrect so the problem is not the VDP code specifically, but the code
  that loads the ram.
- traced it further to the decompress function called at 0x00c0, this function definitely loads
  the source ram and it's definitely incorrect long before the actual VRAM is loaded

- so I set a breakpoint at c0 in blastem, and then at that point set 266 and continued until the
  first different byte was loaded, and inspected all the CPU registers at that point.  The only
  one differing is %d6 which holds a copy of the flags, which is somehow/somewhere restored after
  being saved.  It's 0x2700 in blastem but 0x2710 in moa...
- so far I'm suspecting that the Extend flag is not being correctly simulated somewhere, and
  that's causing problems.  The code uses roxd instructions which use the Extend flag... sus
- the two places where %d6 is set in the decompress function are just after LSR instructions.
  I didn't have tests for LSR or LSL, so adding some caught the issue where Extend is not cleared
  by the instruction nor by the logic flags code (since most logic instructions don't affect extend)
- fixing this made the text of the demo appear correctly, along with colour changing of the text,
  but the background is not rendering at all

- switching gears now, trying GenTestV3.  A write to read only memory occurs at 0x2976 because %a4
  is 0 when it should be the VDP data register (0xC00000)
- tracing back, there is some code run at 0x2572 which causes the registers to be cleared, but
  checking in BlastEm's debugger with a breakpoint there shows it's not executing there, so this
  is a problem in moa and it's caused an erroneous processor state...
- there's a comparison at 0x255e which jumps to the code that shouldn't run, checking in BlastEm
  shows that the previous comparison should not be equal (flags are 0x2700), but in moa it's 0x2704
- the comparison is correct, but the value in %d7/%d3 should be 0xff instead of 0xef
- at 0x2a78 the values are read from the controller inputs 0xa10003, and this is what's not correct
  the data read is 0 but should be something else I think (start of code is 0x2a4a)
- it appears that the controller inputs should be 1s instead of 0s when not pressed?? or when all
  bits are 0?
- changing to that behaviour makes it work until the ram test is invoked, but it seems that BlastEm
  also does write to address 0 when the RAM test is run...
- the writing to address 0 might be an unintentional bug in the rom, which doesn't otherwise affect
  anything because removing read_only makes it work enough to run

- next issue is controllers, it turns out the button logic is inverted, so the rom expects to read
  all 1s (0xfff) for the button states, and a bit will drop to 0 when it's pressed.
- now there's an issue with the 'a' button to go to the info screen where it sometimes seems to run
  the memory test instead, or otherwise behave inconsistently, and it's probably that 1.5ms delay
  that resets the cycle to avoid the extra 3 buttons.  This rom probably only reads the first 3 and
  expects the counter to reset
- turned out that i actually need to reset the th counter after the ctrl port is written to, and the
  count/next_byte logic was broken, so the buttons were incorrectly mapped

- now the test works, memory tests work, and so far looking at the info pages, the sprites are almost
  correct, but sonic is busted.  It might be something to do with the sprite being reversed

2021-12-04
- colour bleed test: 0x230a
- there are two of the four bars of colours with the rest black except some garbage at the bottom.
- I was able to modify the pattern printing to put a white dot in the upper corner so I could count
  the cells to figure out where in memory the garbage pixels were appearing.  The garbage starts on
  a ways into line 23 and continues on lines 24/25/26, where the scroll is 64 cells across, and the
  start of scroll a is 0xE000, which makes 0xEB80 about the start of the garbled line.
- the cells in the table look correct here, each line contains increasing pattern numbers (0x0518 at
  the garbled cells), so the problem isn't here
- looking at the pattern for 0x518, which corresponds to address 0xA300 in video memory, the data is
  not at all like the regular patterns at the start of VRAM.  Comparing it to blastem shows the VRAM
  is correctly regular (0x1111 or 0x5151 and other regular repeating patterns), so it looks like
  a problem with loading VRAM
- look at the included source, the start of the colour bleed test is 0x2056, the DMA transfer is set
  up at 0x207a which then writes to the control port to start the transfer
- I started suspecting the transfer count might be the number of read/write cycles as opposed to the
  number of bytes, and only half the data is transferred, which would explain why the bottom half of
  all the screens was broken but the top half looked fine
- sure enough, checking in blastem it even prints $4600 words, but moa was subtracting 2 from the
  count.  Changing to 1 pretty much fix all the remaining glitches, and sonic 2 now displays pretty
  well

- started implementing scrolling.  It seems the horizontal and vertical values work opposite to each
  other.  The horizontal value needs to be subtracted.  I might also need to convert them to signed?
- initial problem was caused by getting the mask wrong (0x3F instead of 0x3FF), but the mask is
  required because technically games can use the extra bits for whatever they want =(
- the background was still glitching and it turned out to be because for scroll b, I was reading
  the scrolling data 1 byte over instead of 2 bytes over (because they are words).  That fixed
  the glitching


2021-12-15
- started trying to make horizontal line scrolling work.  Turns out to not be too hard except that
  there's a few glitches
- one turned out to just be that i was multiplying by 2 instead of 4 for the hscroll addr
- the other is that it's drawing the lines for scroll a and scroll b at the same time, and they
  overlap incorrectly when the per-pixel column offset is different between the layers

2021-12-20
- looking into the hscroll and vscroll issue, I realized I wasn't adding the (vscroll % 8) value to the
  pixel offset, which is now being added, which causes some glitches at the bottom/left of the screen,
  but it now scrolls more smoothly in the vertical
- there is still an issue with the hscroll, particularly when the offsets are very different, no idea

- after spending the day looking into the slowdown issue, I found the issue.  I started by looking at
  the sonic 2 disassembly looking for code that reads the controllers (ReadJoypads) and then looking
  for where that is called from, and found the Vint_Level function which after setting some breakpoints
  is definitely only called during gameplay but is called each frame and reads the input before updating
  the screen.
- looking at the code, and tracing the first few instructions where the ReadJoypads function is called
  showed that it sometimes skipped over the various timer checks every other time it's called
- I added the system clock time to the debug output, which showed that it was indeed ~33_200_000 ns
  between each call to Vint_Level
- so I turned on a debug message for the hardware interrupts and it showed the interrupt occurring
  twice for every time the Vint_Level function is called.  After the first vint, it takes ~14ms until
  the Vint_Level function runs... looking at what runs by tracing that period between the int and call
  shows that it's looping while checking the status bit of the VDP, which corresponds to the vblank
  bit, of which there is a bad implementation that just turns the bit on after 14ms ... so it is
  definitely a problem with the vertical interrupt and vertical blanking bit timing in the VDP step
- I had hackishly made some code to turn the blanking bit on at ~14ms, and then turn it off just before
  the vint was triggered.  It would have worked had the frame been drawn at the 14ms mark, and then the
  blanking bit reset at 16.6ms.  I've now changed it to be proper, in that the blanking bit is set at
  15ms, the count is reset at 16.6ms, and the blank bit is cleared at 1.2ms

2021-12-23
- looking into the coprocessor not working.  I tried Mortal Kombat 2 and apart from something weird
  going on during the character select screen, everything worked until combat started and then it
  crashed due to an invalid memory access to address 0x0068eebb, which occurs at PC: 0xffff0245,
  so something is causing it to execute ram, which is probably not what's supposed to happen
- It looks like it's swapping stacks, and that's making it hard to trace.  At some point, it swaps
  the stack and then does a rts, but the stack return value is invalid and that causes it to mess up.
  It almost looks like it does put a valid return on the stack but then unintentionally overwrites it
  due to overlapping memory areas (I could just be tracing this wrong).  I'll come back to this later

2021-12-26
- looking into the scroll black bits, I checked the scroll table for Sonic2 in BlastEm and the values
  are clearly different for Scroll B.  The values in BlastEm are close to 0xffff but the ones in Moa
  are 0x10f2, 0x11f2, etc.  And it's wrong in the source ram (0xffe000 which is copied to 0xfc00 in VRAM)
- I added watcher debug commands to watch for modifications to a given memory location, and used that
  to watch 0xffe322, which is an scroll value for Scroll B in an area near the end of the hscroll table
  where the scroll value is different from BlastEm.
- breakpoint occurs at 0xc670 where that value is written to.  The function starts at 0xC57E and
  calculates scroll values.
- so far I'm suspecting the DIV followed by the EXTW at 0xc62a might be doing something incorrect,
  and then when it adds the result in %d0 to %d3 before using that as the scroll value, it's adding
  too large a value (that should have been cut off to a word)
- there was indeed a problem with the div.  It's a signed div but the division was unsigned.  Now
  the scroll values look about right, but the black glitches are still there
- turns out it was that the scroll values were inverted.  The hscroll values are supposed to be the
  offset *per line*, so you use the same hscroll value for every line.  It's the vscroll value that
  has to be looked up for ever column, so swapping the vscroll and hscroll between the inner and
  outer loops fixed the issue perfectly.  Kind of odd that it wasn't more broken when inverted

- now I've noticed there's a scroll problem in Ren & Stimpy.  Every other cell's hscroll is 0
- looks like address 0x264 is the start of the transfer to the hscroll table in vram
  0x83e2 is the function that calls 0x244.  244 sets up the transfer and 83e2 sends the data
- the auto-increment is set to 0x20 which leaves that 0 in between, but after thinking about it more,
  I realized that's correct, and that it's actually 32 bytes (16 words) between each scroll value,
  The bug was in the hscroll function which I didn't actually fix properly.  I modified it to
  multiply the line by 4 instead of 2, but I also needed to shift to the hcell value by 5 instead
  of 4 (multiply by 32 instead of 16) to get the proper base scroll
  Now, Ren & Stimpy works, and Sonic 2's Scroll B actually looks right


2021-12-30
- rewrote the main drawing functions to go pixel by pixel through the whole image and determine what
  colour that pixel should be.  It's a lot slower, but it's more accurate, and makes it possible
  to more properly implement the priority shadow/highlight modes


2021-12-12
- this is when I committed the audio support, but I'm not sure when I started.  It was a little earlier
- cpal uses a callback to get the next buffer of data, so the buffer needs to be assembled outside of
  the callback, with each device creating a Source with a buffer, that the mixer/output can draw upon
- initially I had it give an iterator to load the buffer, but that doesn't work for ym2612 generation
  because it itself needs to mix a bunch of sources together to get the output buffer
- I made it use a circular buffer so that unused data can be skipped to keep the simulation in sync
- from various glitches I was able to get it to playback tones smoothly, with only the occasional pop


2022-01-17
- finally have done more, added the various register locations to set the frequency of the operators,
  and added a way to combine the samples according to the algorithm of ops to get sound
- had to add `.reset()` to start from the beginning when a note is played, in order to prevent clicks
  from the waveform all of a sudden jumping in level when the note starts
- started adding a binary to control just the ym2612 for testing, so I can isolate issues, and a lot
  of minor issues have turned up

2022-01-18
- some kind of buffer problem causing clicking, where the waveform resets, possibly related to circular
  buf
- a quick attempt at fixing it shows that the audio source buffer is only copied to the mixer buffer
  when it's written to the buffer (and overfills).  Attempt to not write to the buffer means audio stops
  when the source buffer is full

2022-01-24
- finally took another look and the glitching turned out to be an issue with the buffer size where the
  check before the audio devices write only account for one channel of audio instead of two, so the
  buffer was over filling.  Dividing the available buffer size by 2 fixed it


General Work
============

2022-10-08
- I replaced the circular buffer with queues of audio frames, which might be less able to handle time
  dialation, but which uses fewer locks for less time, which seems to improve the occasional dropout
  glitches.  The next frame is also assembled by whichever sim audio source that pushes data sees
  the queue is empty (audio frame taken by the output callback), so it then assembles the next frame
  and pushes it to the queue.  It definitely works better, but there are still some timing issues
- the PCM data in ym2612, looking at the recording of the waveform, shows it's offset by a bias, which
  probably shouldn't be.  The other audio sounds distorted but still sort of sounds like what it should,
  so I don't think it's too far off

2023-03-25
- trying to improve the performance.  It seems to be at about 20 to 30 fps on firefox but 60 fps on
  chrome and I'm not sure why the difference.
- I tried a change that allows the frontend to request a pixel encoding format so it doesn't have to
  change it after the fact, but that doesn't seem to help much, or possibly even hurt performance a
  bit, but it's hard to know with just flamegraph.

- without knowing the tricks that games might use, it's hard to really optimize the ym7101 code,
  which is taking up the most time per loop.  The game might change the colour palette during the
  update, for example.
- that said, I'm actually just updating the whole frame at a time instead of drawing lines
  individually, with steps in between so the game can do those tricks...  and I don't see a lot of
  issues with colour glitches and stuff

2023-04-22
- I'm back to trying to get the ym2612 emulation working properly for the Genesis

2023-04-23
- I managed to get the idea of the envelope implemented but it's clearly very broken and I don't
  know why exactly.  It could easily be the waveform generators or bugs or anything else.  I have
  already found and fixed a number of bugs, so there are probably more

2023-04-24
- I added a print statement to blastem to see how the envelope value was varying over time based on
  the envelope state and what update cycle it was in.  In moa, it shows the envelope output varying
  over many many update cycles which I thought was maybe wrong, and the decay was only lasting one
  cycle
- It turned out blastem showed the same output varying over many cycles, so that wasn't a problem,
  but it showed the decay lasting many cycles too
- it also showed the envelope output being up to 4092 instead of ~1024 and I didn't notice until now
  but there's a comment that blastem is using a 12 bit number in two parts, 8 bits and 4 bits, but I
  don't yet know how it uses those numbers to get the output
- the decay lasting only one cycle turned out to be a bug where I was masking the wrong bits and
  shifting them away, so it was always 0.
- there was also a bug in that the raw values from the registers needs to be adjusted to make it
  comparable to the envelope, and the total level also needs to be adjusted (which I was already
  doing but it's a 10 bit value)
- it looks like the release rate also needs to be adjusted.  It should be shifted left and
  incremented to make it the same as the other rates

- after messing with it, it still didn't seem to work, and it still doesn't work correctly, but
  changing from a sine wave generator to a square wave generator made it go from being muddled and
  mute sounding to sounding crisp and much closer to what it's supposed to sound like

- in order to match the way I did the rates, I modified the frequency setting code to store the
  fnumber and block in the operators themselves, and used the cached registers to update the values
  whenever either of the sets of registers was updated.  It previously only updated the frequency if
  the A0 registers were written, so it was multiple octaves lower than it should have been
- now it actually sounds pretty close for the high pitch tones, but the base tones are completely
  missing