Refactoring complete

For the last couple of months I've been doing some major refactoring of Prism's glue logic, data bus mux, MMU and SRAM/flash memory control subsystem. This has been a heck of a lot of work for very little in the way of new features - however it's reduced the delay on a lot of signals which means that hopefully, with a little tweaking, Prism should be able to run stable at faster CPU speeds.


The new features added during this time are minimal but potentially useful:

1. Spectrum +2A/+3 special memory modes added. Not much software that I'm aware of uses this "CP/M" or "all RAM" memory configuration - except CP/M of course and John Elliott's wonderful ZxZvm (which lets you play various Infocom adventures like Zork and Hitchiker's Guide to the Glalaxy on the Spectrum). A number of people, including me, have also written utilities to run ROM images (like the Interface 1 ROM cartridges) using this memory configuration.
2. A selectable "Video RAM Aperture". Select between VRAM being accessible by the CPU at memory addresses 0x4000 - 0x5AFF (default) or VRAM being the entire 16K between 0x4000 and 0x7FFF.  The advantages of the default mode are that the system variables, printer buffer and the beginning of BASIC don't get stored in video memory and so allow the user to use video modes which use more VRAM than the standard Spectrum screen mode from BASIC without crashing (careful use of the "planar write mask" lets you write to other parts of VRAM). The disadvantage of the default mode is that software which uses certain Timex screen modes expect VRAM to be at 0x4000 - 0x5AFF and 0x6000 - 0x7AFF. So both modes have their uses. If using SE Basic in double-width mode for example, you will need to switch to the 16K VRAM aperture. 

So just a quick update despite the fact I've just finished a bucketload of work (and still have a metric shitload of testing and tweaking to do!). I'll leave you with an "actual Prism screenshot!!!" teaser from when I was testing the VRAM aperture - a 16 colour, no colour clash image displayed using the 4-plane planar mode: