Hi all !!

I was wondering about this:

If I use a cardridge with an IDE Flash card:
Can I then play music on interrupt, then dissable the interrupt and load a file from IDE (like 1 kb in size), then switch back to int mode, and play the music again..

In other words, can I, FAST ENOUGH, play music, load a 1 kb file, play music, load a 1 kb file, play music, load, play music, load etc etc... ???

How long (in frames) does it take to load a 1 kb file with a flash card?

yes you can. speed depens on your msx.

I always thought it was impossible, until I discovered EVAplayer and more recently, Nyyrikki his Dungeons&Dragons demo.

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Hi all !! I was wondering about this: If I use a cardridge with an IDE Flash card: Can I then play music on interrupt, then dissable the interrupt and load a file from IDE (like 1 kb in size), then switch back to int mode, and play the music again.. In other words, can I, FAST ENOUGH, play music, load a 1 kb file, play music, load a 1 kb file, play music, load, play music, load etc etc... ??? How long (in frames) does it take to load a 1 kb file with a flash card?

No need, just don't disable the interrupts while loading the data... All there's to it...

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I always thought it was impossible, until I discovered EVAplayer and more recently, Nyyrikki his Dungeons&Dragons demo.

Both are EVA, actually, and it plays PCM data, not 'music'. EVA accesses the IDE on a lower level though, which is not required for 'playing normal music'.

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yes you can. speed depens on your msx.

meaning that the IDE (which works as a harddisk, if Im correct?) works just like RAM memory accessing ??
The same speed ??

Lets say I want to load a a 5 KB file every frame.
Is that possible or is that TOO much to load within one frame ??

Im wondering about the speed/loading time.

5KB/frame (50Hz) could be a little bit too much. I don't know the exact maximum data transfer rate of the MSX2 yet, but on the CPC it's 162KB/s without file system overhead (pure sector reading) and 139KB/s with file system overhead. On the MSX it maybe a little bit more, as you can use LDI instead of OUTI:INC B, but the difference shouldn't be too much. With 162KB/s you have 3,24KB/frame (50Hz).

Regarding interrupts: You don't need to disable them during loading from IDE, as the IDE controller has it's own sector buffer, what means, that the MSX don't need to poll the data. So playing sound during loading from IDE is possible

I get about 174KB/s with scsi on 3.54Mhz.. and double that on 7.16Mhz. With an ide interface it can get upto 380KB/s on 7.16Mhz

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meaning that the IDE (which works as a harddisk, if Im correct?) works just like RAM memory accessing ?? The same speed ??

RAM memory accessing is still much faster than any kind of disk access... HD, CF or otherwise. It doesn't matter if it's FDC, IDE, SCSI or whatever new type on interface will appear for MSX. It's just a way to communicate with the device (FDD, HD, CF, CD-ROM, ZIP, etc.) and the real issue is the time the interrupts are disabled. And that time is quite linear to the access speed of the devices which is higher with IDE and SCSI under normal conditions. It is possible to write an access routine for FDC which keeps interrupts enabled, but it'll reduce the reliabilty (not to mention the speed) of the accessing.

Thanx !!

I was thinking about making a video for the msx. Screen 5. 50 hertz.
What I want to achieve is load a 100x100 pix picture from FlashCard and put it in screen every 5 frames.
Meaning that you would get a video with a frame rate of about 10 frames per second.
The video will have music as well.

Do you think this is possible?
Lets say I have 1000 files on my flash card (all 100x100 pictures; forming the video).
Can I fast enought load them and put them in screen so a video appears ??

Better put all those files in one file. Which will speed up things

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I was thinking about making a video for the msx. ...snip... Do you think this is possible?

The answer is 'EVA', I think

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Quote: I was thinking about making a video for the msx. ...snip... Do you think this is possible? The answer is 'EVA', I think

Indeed, no point in re-inventing the wheel. EVA is pretty cool as it is, and it wouldn't be easy to do much better. You can go for 'normal' EVA and just make SC8 and SC12 versions of each animation, loading the SC8 one if no V9958 was found. You can very easily adapt the normal replayer to suit your needs to use it without the command prompt.

You can also do what Nyyrikki did, simply modify the screen data to whatever suits your needs (in your case Screen5) and adjust the initializing routines and the command routines so they switch to the correct screenmode and write the proper VDP command. I think hanso's site had the sources of the IDE version, but even using a debugger this should be fairly easy to do.

EVA uses 128x106 bytes for each video frame, so you'll have 13568 bytes for your screen data. You could do (for instance) 192x140 pixels in Screen5, and have 128 bytes left for palette data and any other info you might want to store. Of course you would have to add the palette routines yourself in that case. Another option would be to use a fixed palette, saving yourself the hassle of having to adjust the main routines. A simple greyscale pallette would look pretty cool too.

Problem with eva is still that it can't be used on all "HDD" controllers

I dont have an IDE Flash card yet,
but am planning to buy one.
Can I try this ´EVA´ ??

I never heard about it.
How does it work ??
Are there also some example videos I can check out ??

The new bluemsx is good enough ??