Instructor Notes

February 25, 2008

Quote

“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.” - Alan Turing (Chris McKinstry, Push Singh)

Assignment Reminder

• Hello Sprite: due March 2 midnight

Status of programmer order

Review

Sprites

• see GameBoy video tutorial

• go over questions in email to list

• memory map (from gbspec.txt lines 94 to 115:

    Interrupt Enable Register
  
   --------------------------- FFFF
  
    Internal RAM
  
   --------------------------- FF80
  
    Empty but unusable for I/O
  
   --------------------------- FF4C
  
    I/O ports
  
   --------------------------- FF00
  
    Empty but unusable for I/O
  
   --------------------------- FEA0
  
    Sprite Attrib Memory (OAM)
  
   --------------------------- FE00
  
    Echo of 8kB Internal RAM
  
   --------------------------- E000
  
    8kB Internal RAM
  
   --------------------------- C000
  
    8kB switchable RAM bank
  
   --------------------------- A000
  
    8kB Video RAM
  
   --------------------------- 8000
  
    32kB Cartridge
  
   --------------------------- 0000
   

• sprite bug (gbspec.txt lines 770-790)
  • use incdecss.inc and the inc/dev macros to prevent this

Assembler commands

• help: asm.htm
• MACRO: asm/macro.htm
• SET, PRINT, RSSET, HOME, BSS, .labels (see line 101 in hello-world.asm for example)
• _RS counter
• walkthrough of hello-sprite.inc:

  • LoByteVar sort of like declaring variables in c

  • declaration of a structure
• show docs for rgbds

Hello Sprite No Interrupts

• walkthrough

Interrupts

• define Interrupt

• Z80 Interrupt vector not on the GameBoy

• interrupt addresses: gbspec.txt lines 156-180
  • vblank
  • timer (rTMA, rTAC (gbspec lines 1137 - 1155)

  • serial transfer (for connecting multiple GameBoys, for example)

If time

No$GMB emulator

• breakpoint
• animate, trace

for another class

• instruction types
• more on addressing modes (TRS-80 book page 41 chap 3)