Dan’s MEGA65 Digest Podcast

Hey all! I’m keeping this issue short, because there’s something more important for you to do instead of reading.

The MEGA65 Community Survey 2023

The MEGA65 Community Survey 2023 is now open. This survey is for anyone even a little bit interested in the MEGA65, whether you own one, have preordered, are still considering it, or don’t intend to order but still enjoy seeing what’s going on. This includes anyone not subscribed to this Digest, so please share this link.

Responses are anonymous. We will share aggregate anonymized results in a future Digest. Full-text replies will be kept confidential to the MEGA65 Steering Committee.

We’re targeting 400 responses for this year’s survey. If everyone subscribed to the Digest responds, we’ll hit that easily. (Please only take the survey once, so we get accurate counts.)

Here’s that link again: please take the survey. Your response will go a long way to guiding the future of the MEGA65 project. Thank you!

New Galaga core!

After you have completed the survey, it’s time to hit the arcade! Run don’t walk to the Galaga core for the MEGA65 by muse. This isn’t just a version of Galaga for the MEGA65, this is Galaga, a port of the original arcade hardware architecture running directly on the MEGA65 FPGA. The core even supports connecting a vintage VGA monitor turned on its side to fully replicate the arcade experience.

Installation requires a few steps, including fetching the original Midway Galaga ROM from the Internet (using the link provided) and running a Python script. See muse’s installation instructions.

When starting the core, give it a minute to go through the arcade hardware test routine. The core displays its keyboard controls briefly; press the spacebar to dismiss. Press 5 to insert a quarter, then press 1 to start a one-player game. You can control the game via a joystick in port 1, or use the keyboard: A and Z move left and right, and the Cursor Up key fires. The P key pauses. As with the C64 core, press the Help key to open a settings menu.

Huge thanks to muse for this effort, and to all of the original implementors of the core. (And to Midway too, but they already have all of my lunch money.)

R4 is now R5

Last month I mentioned that there will be a new revision of the main board that will start shipping with the next delivery batch, known as R4. Due to restricted availability of a component, the board needs one more revision. This gives us an opportunity to further refine the cartridge interface before the revised board goes into production, so we’re taking that opportunity. The core needs a corresponding adjustment, so the board is now known as “R5” to distinguish between the core builds. R4 boards will not be manufactured. The next delivery batch will receive R5 boards.

The cartridge interface enhancements will make it possible to support fancier utility cartridges. As with the other revisions, only time will tell what differences will actually be notable in practice. The most important reason to know which main board revision you have is to download the correct versions of core files.

Pudding Mountain Miner 65

I said I’d keep this short, but I can’t resist including a bit of BASIC fun.

Of all the Commodore 64 games that could have been a staple of my childhood, an unlikely contender was “Pudding Mountain Miner” by Charles Brannon. Brannon was an editor for Compute!’s Gazette magazine, and originally wrote “Pudding Mountain Miner” as a short type-in to appear in newspapers promoting the magazine when it was getting started. He wrote up an explainer in the April 1985 issue of Gazette, in the “Horizons” column.

The game is a one-button shooter where you’re a fighter pilot dropping bombs on Pudding Mountain, digging for buried treasure. If you hit the dollar sign, you win the big bucks. If you hit the mantle underneath the pudding, it’s game over.

I liked Miner because it was fun and cute, and also because it was only 17 lines of BASIC code. I don’t think I ever bothered to save it to disk. I would just type it in any time I wanted to play it.

Here’s the program listing converted to a form where you can use it with petcat to generate a PRG in case you don’t want to type it in (but what’s the fun in that?). This version runs just fine with the MEGA65’s GO64 mode.

100 v=(peek(0)=76):w=40+18*v:t=1024-6656*v:c=55296+16896*v:s=53281+16402*v 110 c$=chr$(147):printc$:pokes,1-26*v:for i=0tow-1:q=22*w+i 115 poket+q,160:pokec+q,7:next 120 s$=chr$(32)+chr$(158)+chr$(18)+chr$(188)+chr$(146)+chr$(156)+chr$(185) 130 s$=s$+chr$(31)+chr$(175):q=rnd(1)*(w-7)+3+22*w:poket+q,164:pokec+q,5 140 fori=0tow-1:forj=0to7*rnd(1)+3:q=(21-j)*w+i:poket+q,160:pokec+q,2:next:next 150 printchr$(142);chr$(19);:y%=4*rnd(1)+1:fori=1toy%:print:next:x=0 160 l$=chr$(157):prints$;l$;l$;l$;:x=x+1:geta$:ifa$=""andx