Agon Platform VDP 2.15.0 "SEP Field"

This is the third official release of the Agon Platform VDP firmware, the 26th from this organisation counting releases before the name change.

This version of the VDP firmware is suitable to be installed and run on any and all Agon Platform machines, including all versions of the Agon Light and the Agon Console8. It will work with any version of Agon MOS from 1.04 onwards, although you are recommended to use MOS 3.0.1 or later.

Supporting development

If you would like to support the development of the Agon Platform firmware, you can sponsor me on GitHub or join my Patreon.

Release notes

This version includes several new features, improvements and bug fixes.

The new features are summarised as follows:

Both the mouse cursor and text cursor are now drawn to screen as "hardware sprites"
- This change should be completely transparent to users, with no new APIs or commands added
- Performance related to hiding/showing/moving these cursors has improved
- As the mouse cursor is no longer a type of software-sprite, mouse interactions no longer force sprites to be redrawn
- Some screen corruption bugs related to the text cursor in rare circumstances not being erased correctly have been eliminated
The Tile Engine now supports up to four tile banks
Many new VDP Variables have been added
- These were primarily focussed around exposing the keyboard and mouse state, and any/all information that might be sent from the VDP to MOS via the VDP Protocol
- Many other variables exposing other parts of the VDP state have also been added
- A variable is now available which when set will suppress the next VDP protocol packet from being sent to MOS
- Full information on the new variables can be found in the documentation
Support for several new "events" has been added to the VDP
- These include events related to keyboard, mouse, changing the palette, and the VDP protocol
- Please see the Buffered Commands API documentation for more info on events and callbacks)
The default system font now better aligns with the CP1252 character set, with definitions added for characters 0-31
The agon-vdp project's build configuration has been updated to allow the use of C++17 language features

Bug fixes in this release include:

A bug that prevented the palette from being properly reset using VDU 20 was fixed
An issue that prevented setting "skew" and "shear" affine transform matrixes with y-axis values was fixed
Several issues related to text cursor behaviour, text printing, and the handling of "paged mode" were identified and fixed
- In testing, when the text cursor is active, all behaviour now matches Acorn RISC OS
- When output is paused by "paged mode", pressing "Escape" will now exit/continue (as per Acorn systems)
- Fixed a bug that prevented paged mode from pausing continuous output (without explicit newlines)
- A bug found with VDU 31 (TAB) when the text cursor behaviour was set to invert one or both axes that resulted in the cursor being positioned incorrectly by 1 pixel was fixed
- Fixed a text printing bug that could result in text not being printed to screen when both the "scroll protect" cursor behaviour and paged mode were set

Why "SEP Field"?

As noted on the VDP 2.14.0 release the sub-titles for VDP releases after named after things from Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy multiverse.

Much of the changes in this release are about infrastructure enhancements, things working invisibly in the background. For example, the VDP now uses hardware-sprite based cursors, but they just work without user intervention. These improvements are all mostly somebody else's problem.

Upgrading your VDP firmware

The easiest way to update your VDP is to use the online Agon VDP installer. This will allow you to update your Agon's VDP firmware no matter what firmware version your Agon currently has installed.

Please note that if you are running a version of MOS earlier than Quark 1.04 (before RC3) you should first update your MOS firmware using the Agon firmware update utility, and then update your VDP firmware as described above.

Other ways of updating your VDP firmware

If you are running VDP firmware version 1.04RC3 or later you can update your VDP firmware using the Agon firmware update utility, the latest release of which (v1.9 at the time of writing) can be downloaded here.

Simply download the firmware.bin release file below, place it on your Agon's SD card, and follow the instructions.

If you are using VDP versions 2.8.0, 2.12.0 or 2.13.0 then you will not be able to use the Agon firmware update utility. The easiest way to update from any of these three versions is using the online Agon VDP installer.

Other ways to update your VDP firmware include using PlatformIO to build and install the VDP firmware from source, or using Espressif's tooling to install firmware. For most users we strongly advise using the online Agon VDP installer.

What's Changed

Extend tilebank by @julianregel in #338
add mouse event callbacks by @stevesims in #323
Add variables for read character and colour info, and keyboard things too by @stevesims in #326
use an event queue for keyboard and mouse packets by @stevesims in #328
Hardware sprite based text cursor and VDU 20 fix by @stevesims in #330
Extended CP1252 character set by @sijnstra in #331
add support for suppressing next VDP packet by @stevesims in #333
fix logical error in transform matrix code by @stevesims in #337
bump version to 2.15.0 by @stevesims in #339

Full Changelog: v2.14.1...v2.15.0

Contributors

stevesims, julianregel, and sijnstra

Assets 6

26 Apr 15:12

stevesims

v2.14.1

97c0c4f

v2.14.1

Agon Platform VDP 2.14.1 Dressing Gown

This is the second official release of the Agon Platform VDP firmware, the 25th counting the previous releases before the name change.

Supporting development

If you would like to support the development of the Agon Platform firmware, you can sponsor me on GitHub or join my Patreon.

Release notes

This version includes a small bug fix to the VDP, and some minor related enhancements.

The bug was related to how the VDP would behave when it restarts immediately following a firmware update performed using the Agon firmware update (agon-flash) utility. This tries to detect the VDP restart by looking for updated mode information being sent from the VDP, but that was no longer happening. This has now been fixed.

Whilst making this change, it was also spotted that some Font API calls that could result in adjusted mode information were not sending that to the VDP; they now do.