Screen Resolutions For Your BASIC Engine Projects

painintheworld

What screen modes are you guys using for your Engine BASIC projects?

I am slowly but surely working on a few things, including an Atari 8 bit Star Raiders type game. I'm not exactly certain of my reasoning behind it, but SCREEN 13 (640x256), SCREEN 14 (480x270), and SCREEN 15 (640x480) seem to be quite fitting for what my idea of what the BASIC Engine targets for me. SCREEN 14 just seems like something a kickass late era 8 bit machine would have excelled at, circa 1985ish.

Now that I've cleaned up enough of the mess at my main house to have a computer desk again, the main monitor used has been a 24" 1080p Dell monitor. About once per week I do some Engine BASIC stuff in the car, whilst waiting on the wife's work shift to end, and I use an 11" 1366x768 12 volt DC HDMI/VGA/composite/BNC monitor affixed to a padded laptop desk.

For editing programs, via the default line number direct mode or via ATTO, SCREEN 13 seems to fit the bill great.

Hawk

I was tending to the lower resolution modes. My programming began in the early 80s when 320x192 was hi resolution. Initially it was because I was using the hosted version of BASIC Engine, limiting me to the classic version. Now I’m using the SDL version. I’m not yet coding directly on the hardware platform, as I don’t have a spare HDMI monitor to hook up to my Tauon PC-1. Unfortunately the TAuon PC-1 does not drive a DVI monitor with a HDMI to DVI cable. I was hoping it would, as I have some nice 15” Sony CRTs with DVI that I was hoping to use. I was only planning to use a 4:3 monitor.
As I progress with my card game I will decide what resolution fits best. One of the issues with the higher resolutions is the graphical resources become more difficult/time consuming to create, store, and more around.
I have been programming a text based game, and the 7x5 font is very different from what I am used to. With an Atari 8bit history, 8x8 is more comfortable.

painintheworld

Hawk I am an Atari 8 bit guy, too 🙂 I've got a stack of them next to me right now...getting ready to go to storage for a while. I'm going to keep a 1200XL, 800XL, 130XE, and a 600XL here, however. I've got some goodies to go in the 600XL...most all of the "high end" stuff, except for a VBXE - which will have to wait a little while. What interests me most is the PokeyMAX V3 that I have. It eludes me as to which configuration it was programmed for (dual POKEY, COVOX, and ??)

I finally pulled the SBC out of the Tauon keyboard assembly (one of the USB ports is defective). A $5 generic USB hub rectified the problems that it gave me. I've not had any luck with the only two DVI enabled monitors I have access to at the moment (one is a Dell 2007FP and a Dell something or another). Was really hoping it would work with the Dell 2007! The split screen with a BASIC Engine NG and an original BASIC Engine via composite would be cool.

@Hawk and @davegardnerisme SCREEN 14 is what I really like to use, too, and since I know that some others dig it, that will be the resolution of the couple of games I'm plugging away at.

I started a sprite and/or tile tool a few weeks back, but it will have to run at SCREEN 15 as a minimum - at least the way that it is laid out now

Edit: @Hawk Even though I should be MUCH better with Linux, Unix, etc. than I am, considering that everything I started on from the late 70s through the late 80s were command line based...I am worthless on them 🙁 I fired up an Ubuntu virtual machine, but am not certain of all the steps required to get the SDL version going. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

davegardnerisme

Find myself sticking with SCREEN 14 (480 x 270). Seems to work well for 16x16 tiles and sprites.

Hawk

painintheworld
I am envious of your Atari collection...I have my orignal 400 and a couple of XEGSs, but would love an XL and XE. The only mod I've made to my Ataris other than fixing them is to fit a NOS 48K expansion into my 400 so I could connect a disk drive.
It took me a little ferkling to get SDL to build without instructions. There were some extra packages that I had to install, and it wasn't exactly obvious what they were called. I'll see if I can document what I needed to do.
I'm working in a Debian environment these days, and use the command line when necessary, but as my memory fails me more often, I enjoy the visual prompts that a GUI gives me to what (and how) to do what I want to do. When programming for the BASIC Engine, I need to keep the manual handy. ;^)
One of my requests that I'm going to make to Uli is to allow the pixels to be increased in size for the SDL version, as they are REALLY small on my display, and I haven't worked out how to make them bigger.
I really want to program on the real hardware, even if using the full screen editor, but the Tauon PC-1 keyboard is not the best, and the backspace key is in a horrible location. I need that key a lot.

uli

Hawk One of my requests that I'm going to make to Uli is to allow the pixels to be increased in size for the SDL version, as they are REALLY small on my display, and I haven't worked out how to make them bigger.

Upon closer inspection I am happy to inform you that such a feature is actually already implemented. I just forgot about it. Oops. 🤷‍♂️
It needed a little fix for colorspace conversion and an option to set the desired window size, which I have just pushed.

Try running the SDL binary with "-d -s 800x600", and it will open a window of the given size and keep that size, scaling any screen mode to fit.

Alternatively, you can switch to full screen using Alt-Return (or by using the "-f" option). In full screen mode, the physical resolution is changed as you set BASIC screen modes, unless you specify the "-d" option, in which case the initial resolution is maintained and the screens are software-scaled to fit.

Hawk

I'm happy to report that the information in this post H3 News allowed be to configure BASIC Engine at boot time to set the physical resolution to 800x600 and allow me to drive my nice little Sony 15" LCDs with either HDMI-to-VGA or HDMI-to-DVI. I am very happy.
Clearly, at this pysical resolution, there are a few screen resolutions that are unreadable, however setting them does not crash BASIC Engine, and although unreadibly small, it is still recognisable.
Given this, I have been considering the SCREEN 14 resolution.
I'm not great a stringing words together, but given Uli's workload on development, I need to balance my experimentation and play with assisting with development in the way of bug reports, and documentation. There is some really good information regarding the configuration of BASIC Engine in that H3 News thread and we need to get it into a User Manual.

painintheworld

Hawk I should work on a manual. My programming skills are limited, but I can type a little bit and help on a manual 🙂 I've done that on a couple of other 8 bit projects, including Fast Basic for the Atari 8 bit line (in case you use an Atari 8 bit machine and use BASIC, dmsc's Fast BASIC is THE BASIC to use. In lots of things it approaches Action! in speed.)

Thank you on the Linux stuff. I will have some time Thursday to work on the SDL stuff a little bit. The SDL version would be awesome to play about with on the laptop that stays in the Beetle 🙂

Speaking of requests...if you know anyone that has the skills to add stuff to Engine BASIC, I'd pay them to do a thing or two.

While we're on the topic of monitor resolutions...if anyone out here likes to play about with stuff on the go, or are in need of a small monitor with lots of inputs, or would like a modern-ish monitor for retro stuff, there are a plethora of these small LCD monitors (usually with CCTV or surveillance or similar in the title) with HDMI, VGA, composite, and BNC connectors on them. I have been tickled pink with the one in the link below. It is natively 1366x768, but will accept and display an interpolated version of 1080p. Mine is affixed to a padded laptop lap desk, along with a substantial lithium power brick with both a 12 volt and 5 volt output.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08L7Q7Y22/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Hawk

painintheworld I'll have to check out Fast BASIC on the Atari, although I reckon I've heard about it before, but never tried it.
Regarding SDL, I'll try tonight, although my new Orange Pi has arrived, so I will be keen to try that out. Where are you at needing instructions? Should I start all the way from installing git and cloning the repository from Github, or do I just need to skip to the building stage?
I do know someone who has significant coding skills that I have been encouraging to check out Engine BASIC. They could possibly make some changes for you, although they tend to like to write their own stuff from scratch...not so good at adopting other peoples standards.
Wow...those small LCDs are cool, although I haven't spent that much on a monitor for a very long time. These days my monitors are every one elses discards. But when you're dealing with low resolution BASIC Engine programs, they would still be very readable at 11". What is the power consumption like?! I have previously built a "laptop" for a C64 DTV that used an old laptop screen (complete with frame and hinges) and an Ebay LVDS interface board, but the interface board got VERY hot and needed a fair amount of power, so I never converted it to battery operation. It would be interesting to create a laptop version of BASIC Engine.
BTW, maybe we should create a thread specifically for discussing the contants of a User Guide.

painintheworld

A steampunk laptop is the real reason I purchased the monitor 🙂 My brother and I have a large woodworking shop at our mother's house (dad, brother, and myself built it in the mid 1980s), so I've got to get there one day or another and start what I had in mind.

The battery bank is a 6000mAhr at 12 volts, though I have not checked the accuracy of that. My assumption is that the rating is much too generous. The battery powers the monitor and the SBC. I generally get a little bit over three hours out of it that way. I am certain that the battery life would be better if I could get the ^&%$@ monitor to reduce brightness. The on screen display scale shows that it is supposed to be getting dimmer, but that is not the case. When I do get around to doing the laptop, it will be powered by two Makita LXT 18 volt 5 amp hour batteries (for hot swapping more than anything). Under the hood will be the NG, the OG Basic Engine, a Color Maximite (haven't decided if model 1 or 2), a Raspberry Pi 3 running BMC64 (and whatever else), and hopefully an ESP32 running as an Atari 800 (as shown by DJamal UK on YouTube).

Will do on the User Guide!

Don't go to much trouble for me on the SDL stuff...but for what it is worth, I am a neophyte 🙁

MC10Guru

Ahoy,
I haven't played much with resolutions. My boot system sets a "screen 3" because that displays perfectly with both HDMI and composite and the Tauon PC-1 can display both at the same time. I also set a TI99/4a font because that was my system for a long time. In a program I'l like to set the resolution to about 256x192 because I'm used to that on the TI.

I have quite a few monitors of varying quality. My main monitors are an LG 24" 4K TV/mon and a Craig 19" 720p TV/mon. I have 5 of thse Craig TVs. I made a bulk purchase of $300 plus tax for all 5. I have a couple 7" HDMI monitors with an odd 1024x600 resolution and EB NG is readable on those.

Speaking of portable, I just got a Vilros 5V 10,000mAh $20 battery pack. It will run the Tauon PC-1 alone for over 16 hrs(!). Hooking up the Tauon and a uPerfect 7" LCD gets me about 6.5-8 hrs on battery. Makes a nice little system. I'm waiting on a Nanopi M1 H3 512MB board to arrive so I can mount it on the 7" monitor and make a portable EB NG system-just add my little Cherry keyboard. It might even run RetrorangePi.
daveyb

Hawk

uli That's really cool. Thanks very much for that. I look forward to testing it out.

Hawk

uli Sorry, I tried the "-d -s 800x600" with a fresh build of the SDL version and it didn't work.
./basic.sdl` -d -s 800x600 ./basic.sdl: invalid option -- 's' Usage: ./basic.sdl [-f] [-d] [-r <BASIC root path>]
Any other ideas?

uli

You are not using the right source code. Have you pulled the latest commits and checked out the nextgen branch?

Hawk

Sorry Uli, I’m not sure. I switched over to the nextgen branch and cloned the repository. I thought I would be getting the latest. I’ll check again tomorrow night.