About a month and a half ago over a weekend, I implemented a Bad Apple demo that ran on the GameTank emulator. Since then I have been hammering out hardware glitches highlighted by the demo in order to get it into a recordable state. This turned into a deep dive into some problems that have been plaguing the system for a long time. Now that they're patched I feel a lot more optimistic about assembling a GameTank Version 3 within 2021, which will be arranged in a proper game console form factor that can fit on the TV stand next to a Genesis or a SNES!

In particular, the video signal generator had a timing glitch whereby pixels in certain locations would cast a "shadow" onto the center column of the screen. This has been noticeable for a while, but given the high contrast of the Bad Apple music video it was a glaring flaw.

Additionally I've respun the blitter board one more time to use 74HC163 counters instead of 74HC191 that I switched to, in order to try adding a sprite flipping feature. The asynchronous reset of the 74HC191 is unwieldy with such tight timing, so instead I'm using a pair of inverting/noninverting buffer chips that can flip the G.RAM coordinate and achieve the same sprite flipping effect.

Not included in the video is a critical fix to the motherboard's generation of read/write pulses. It doesn't make much of a difference in the Bad Apple demo fortunately, but it does mess up graphical operations such as rendering tilemaps in Cubicle Knight. The idea was that ANDing the 3.5MHz and 7MHz clocks would produce a 3.5MHz clock with a shortened positive pulse, but due to a misalignment it would be followed by a brief additional pulse every clock cycle. An adapter board is on its way that will let me cleanly replace the AND gate with a D-type Flip Flop that will produce the correct pulse despite the clock phase error.

The Bad Apple demo itself crams the video frames into 1.2MB using Run-Length Encoding, with each frame being 128x96 and the framerate set to 15/second. The music engine from an earlier post returns and operates in lock-step with the video frames ensuring synchronicity.