Updated PCE development information page?

[Arkhan Asylum]

We don't have a "nesdev.com" , or any centralized source of information. 

We have the mostly defunct Archaic Pixels, info floating around ChrlyMac's site, and stuff on Tom, or Magic Engine's places.

since I highly doubt anyone wants to maintain a site+wiki, I fired up a Wikia.

http://pcedev.wikia.com/?wiki-welcome=1

Should we use this instead, and centralize crap?  Enterprising individuals with copious amounts of free time could sit and migrate stuff, or add new stuff.   Maybe centralizing crap would be a good idea.

Assuming people like the idea, should we basically mimic the categories of NesDev?

on the topic of mirroring documents, does anyone have a place they can do that from? 

I can make a new dropbox as one point of linkage. 



I think this would work better than relying on one of us to maintain a site.   I can't even find time (or motivation) to finish PCFXTOO because it turns out doing webpage stuff is kind of tedious and boring.

Everyone else is busy or gets sidetracked easily...

so this takes most of the effort away.   

What do we think?


EDIT: Also, assuming this is good to go, we should migrate the forum topics here where we can, because these stickied threads are only visible to registered members.   Not everyone does that.

[Gredler]

This is great, thanks for starting this. If nothing else a fat dump of info anywhere in text form is great for a base to manicure and display elsewhere.

I've never contributed to a public wiki, but I'd love to document whatever I can from an art standpoint.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Ideally, a non-service-place-hosted Wiki would be better, but...

I personally don't want to be the one responsible for the hosting/etc.    We're already doing Aetherbyte and PCFXTOO (lol kinda), and Paul does Sunteam/PCESB, so it's not like either of us is going to want to get down on fucking with a Wiki to.

If everyone seems OK, later tonight or something I can lay out the basic things, and figure out how to make it so not just any random dingus can show up and be like

THIS THING HAS TWO 8 BIT CPUS, LOL.

[elmer]

since I highly doubt anyone wants to maintain a site+wiki, I fired up a Wikia.

http://pcedev.wikia.com/?wiki-welcome=1

Should we use this instead, and centralize crap?  Enterprising individuals with copious amounts of free time could sit and migrate stuff, or add new stuff.   Maybe centralizing crap would be a good idea.

Excellent idea! 

on the topic of mirroring documents, does anyone have a place they can do that from? 

I can make a new dropbox as one point of linkage.

I'm still hoping to get the PCE Developer docs up on esteban's tg-16.com, but really, they can go anywhere (except, probably, wikia itself).

I think this would work better than relying on one of us to maintain a site.   I can't even find time (or motivation) to finish PCFXTOO because it turns out doing webpage stuff is kind of tedious and boring.

Everyone else is busy or gets sidetracked easily...

so this takes most of the effort away.   

What do we think?

I think that you're spot-on, and have a good solution. 

I do not want to run a website ... but wouldn't mind occasionally rarely editing a page-or-two, here-or-there.

THIS THING HAS TWO 8 BIT CPUS, LOL.

A "Myths" page might not be inappropriate. 

[Arkhan Asylum]

I think as everyone's developed, especially back in the day, we all just shared around the various docs to each other either on here, magicengine forum, or on IRC,

but now, some of that has gone a bit tits up so it doesn't work as well anymore.

[OldRover]

This is exactly what I was talking about. Count me in.

[Psycho Punch]

This is excellent.

[FraGMarE]

Centralization of informational resources is NEVER a bad thing.  Do it.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Update:

Wikia's editor and crap is pretty terrible.   Is this normal?   I feel like GeoCities/AOL Hometown was less goony.

Going to fiddle around and/or try a different one.

EDIT: Nevermind, I got it. 

I need to find out how to lock this bitch down so Sega16 members don't find it and add stupid information like "can't even blast process" or "can't even does what Nintendon't"

this should work fine to centralize everything. 

post your user names at Wikia here if you plan on contributing.   I think I can add you directly and let you touch stuff.

[Arkhan Asylum]

OK:

Lets talk about migration strategies for Archaic Pixels.   I don't know what software it was made with.  I think Gravis (?) and maybe Tom have rights to that place.   

There *is* useful information there.... but...

1) "Archaic Pixels" is ambiguous and nobody ever finds it unless they're told to go there
2) Nobody can edit/add/update, so that is kind of goofy.

I think we can migrate that stuff over, including all of the relevant pieces parts of the other pages.

The wiki now has a "starting" layout that I've skeleton'd in there.

Once more people are registered and willing to contribute, we can do that "collaborating" thing.

Wikia seems to use this jazzed up navigation bar at the top for going to various pages instead of a box.   I've not sorted out completely how to deal with that yet, since I am waiting to see what everyone thinks, and what everyone might want to do.

I think each section in the "reference" area for example should have a brief "wtf is this", followed by a link to the relevant page.   Meaning, we make a HuC6280 page, and essentially mimic the Wikipedia Entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Soft_HuC6280

and then we do the same for all of the other sections, including listing the instruction set.

These pages can then be barfed into the nav-panel at the top.


It would be nice if we could somehow magically copy-pasta the source from AP's wiki to this one, but I don't know that they are compatible markup languages.

[OldRover]

I'll jump on board this evening. Got a full day of chaos ahead. Never a dull moment 'round these parts.

[Pokun]

Wow this happened a lot faster than I dreamed of!
A wiki is the way to go. That way we can add newly discovered things or fix mistakes easily.

I need to find out how to lock this bitch down so Sega16 members don't find it and add stupid information like "can't even blast process" or "can't even does what Nintendon't"

lol

Lets talk about migration strategies for Archaic Pixels.   I don't know what software it was made with.  I think Gravis (?) and maybe Tom have rights to that place.   

There *is* useful information there.... but...

1) "Archaic Pixels" is ambiguous and nobody ever finds it unless they're told to go there
2) Nobody can edit/add/update, so that is kind of goofy.

I think we can migrate that stuff over, including all of the relevant pieces parts of the other pages.

Yeah it has good info about some of the hardware, and I guess for HuC. It's not much about assembly though. Also a lot of broken pages.


A few things I'd suggest the wiki should eventually explain (not sure in what sections everything would go though):

* Explain all registers for the built-in hardware and add-on hardware in the appropriate sections. Preferibly using official names and terms of things, like both Archaic Pixels and Charles McDonald already partly do.
* Explain all known differences between the original and revisioned HuC6280 (and HuC6260). Only thing I could find is that HuC6280A fixes some volume centering issues in the PSG.
* A list of the reset state of the PC Engine (a list is in the dev docs CPU hardware manual).
* A list of things that needs to be initialized after reset and example init code. I just initialize about all registers, except the DMA ones (since one of them triggers DMA) and some of the PSG registers, just in case.
* An explanation on how to set display resolution as well as showing what commercial games usually set it to.
* How to setup a banking system to map in necessary banks as needed.
* How to upload Background Characters to VRAM.
* How to upload Sprites to VRAM and setup VRAM-SATB DMA to update Sprites.
* How to scroll.
* How to make sound. A simple sound routine that can play sound effects or notes at a specified tempo using the TIMER interrupt or something is fine I guess. Not even Nesdev wiki has this though.
* General program structuring. How the main program loop and interrupts are setup.
* Backup RAM section. Explain the save file format and example code how to read and write to it. The only info about BRAM I've found is in the Magickit library.
* Input devices hardware info and how to read them (with example code). Pad, Mouse, Tsuushin Keyboard etc.
* Whatever we know about Memory Base 128 and Save-kun.
* Everdrive section
* HuCard ROM sizes and mapping (including how emulators handles the 384 kB ROM, and Street Fighter II' mapper).
* CD image format.
* PC Engine GT Com Cable pinout and protocol. I've found zero info about this (other than that it has standard 3.5 mm TRS stereo cable plugs).
* A Super Grafx section. I guess each section could have a Super Grafx paragraph added to it, that explains how things work for the SGX case.

Some of these are maybe more newbie turorial things than reference material I guess. Also these are mostly from a PC Engine developer's view. I guess an emulator developer would want more hardware quirk details.

[TailChao]

* PC Engine GT Com Cable pinout and protocol. I've found zero info about this (other than that it has standard 3.5 mm TRS stereo cable plugs).

It's better not to know.
In short, it's all bitbanged through CLR and SEL unless there's some piece of hardware I don't know about. Kinda lazy.

[Pokun]

Oh well thanks for sharing this information. So the COM port seems to be basically a stripped-down controller port with only pins 6, 7 and 8 (unless there are some more hardware involved).

I guess it would be easy to make a Com Link adapter for any PC Engine.

[OldRover]

I set up a wikia account under the username TheOldRover.

[Gredler]

I signed up as well, username Gredler

[Arkhan Asylum]

I think I added you both to the Content Moderator group.  Go see if you can fuck with stuff.

[Pokun]

OK I signed up as Pokun.

[_Paul]

I'm Sunteam on wikia.

[Gredler]

I need to poke around on it more, super busy this week and gone this weekend, so it might be next week.

I tried adding a "artist references" section for the non-tech savvy artists to have quick reference to info,

http://pcedev.wikia.com/wiki/Artist%27s_References#

but I was not able to link it to the main page, and the aforementioned content will not be updated until next week at the soonest. In its current state I have just an outline for what I plan to cover from my understanding - hopefully I learn through corrections

[Arkhan Asylum]

Yeah, I am still seeing how Wikia comes together.  It's slightly different than the Wiki frameworks I am used to.

I saw that you made the page.

You should be able to create a link to it (by name, using their syntax).

There is no nav box like I am used to, and it seems we can edit the bar up top to have this stuff.

So, I guess the navbar would be good to link to the "Main" page of each subtopic (CPU, Video, Audio, CD, Art, Etc.), and then THAT page can contain all the other stuff?

[Arkhan Asylum]

Bump.
Just a heads up, I didn't forget about this.  I am just in the process of moving furniture around and my computer area looks like Sanford and Son had a stroke in here.

I will try to get that fixed in the next couple of days and move forward with screwing around with the wiki.

Compiling a list of all of the documentation available to us would be a good start, too.

[Gredler]

Bump.
Just a heads up, I didn't forget about this.  I am just in the process of moving furniture around and my computer area looks like Sanford and Son had a stroke in here.

I will try to get that fixed in the next couple of days and move forward with screwing around with the wiki.

Compiling a list of all of the documentation available to us would be a good start, too.

I just got back from vegas trip for birthday and bachelor party. Once the alcohol withdraws wear off I'll start being able to update my proposed stuff; and will start looking over the formatting and linking markup.

Thanks for doing this!