It have been a while since I last wrote for the Quasar and the
 reason is not difficult to explain. I got a V9990
evaluation board from MSX Handler Gemeinshaft with an
interface for MSX. From now on there will be 2 kinds of MSX
people, those who hate the V9990 and those who love it. After
this article you should have no doubts about what group I
belong to.

The first rumours
I first heard about the V9990 several years ago, it was
 mentioned together with a new MSX computer which had a 16
bit 28 MHz Risc CPU. The new videochip had up to 2048 dots in
the X direction and 2048 in the Y direction, with 32k
colours the quality would   beat all existing hobby
systems. Quite a mouthfull of words so we didnt really
believed it then, only hoped.

The facts of both the 28 MHz and the 2048/1024 dots was not
precisely correct but misunderstandings from people who
could not read and understand the technical information. The
machine was naturally  the Turbo R, all though not as
fast as the rumour. The V9990 DOES have up to 2048 in the X
direction and up to 2048 in the Y dir. but that is in the vram
and NOT on the screen. The V9990 is a very complex chip but
it is incredible simple   to program and therefore the
'thru-put' is much faster than on the know MSX VDP's.
Furthermore the V9990 is ALWAYS ready for the Turbo R,
therefore it is possible to transfer up to 520kbyte or so
from the Turbo R internal RAM to the VRAM with OUT's. This
is nice but the REAL power is internally of the V9990, the
hardwarecommands and other features are much more valuable
than even 2 or 4 higher CPU to VRAM access. (My personal
oppinion.)

I will   not write about the things that you can read in
the Application Manual, get that one from Arjan. I will
bring you here the test results and other things that I found
out.


To see the strength of the V9990 I did some first tests.

The following tests have been made in a screen 7 compatible
mode. Optimized machinecode.

LMMV   LINE   BOXFILL    Fill's about 3.183 Mbyte /sek in B1 mode 
CMMK   KANJI to (X,Y)    Writes about 3.076 Mbyte /sek
LMMM   COPY (X,Y)        Transfers 2.248 Mbyte /sek
                         (Faster if sprites/cursor is disabled)

in P2 mode with the same commands:

LMMV 1.267 Mbyte
CMMK 1.047 Mbyte
LMMM  756 Kbyte
(Also faster with disabled sprites.)

I have also tried to see how many Lines and Copy's the
Turbo R can give in M-Code with different size. (All in B1
mode)

LINE -STEP(3,3)       26087 lines in 1 sek.
LINE -STEP(16,16)     20689 lines in 1 sek.
LINE -STEP(31,31)     15384 lines in 1 sek.
LINE (0,0)-(255,211)  4054 lines in 1 sek.

and COPY:

COPY step(15,15)      8696 times in 1 sek.
COPY step(31,31)      3141 times in 1 sek.


The B1 mode is with only 2 sprites (called Cursors) with 32x32
pixels and multicolour.
The P2 and P1 modes have up to 125 sprites with 16x16 pixels in
multicolour.16 per line.

Compared to the V9958 then the V9990 is MUCH faster in all
concepts. The V9958 have 2 kinds of  COPY. One with
logical operations (in  DOT units) and one without
log.ops. (In BYTE units) The Byte copy is never faster than
350 K/sek and the Dot Copy is only pumping out about
100kbyte/sek. The V9990 only have 1   COPY and that is
always with Logical operations between the Source and the
Destination. If the V9990 COPY is compared with the V9958
Dot COPY then it is  23 times faster ! But compared with
the V9958 Byte COPY it is 'only' 9 times faster in this
command type.

So was the V9958 so bad ?? The answer is no, the VRAM was bad.
The V9990 can only use what is known as REAL video-ram, that
is also called DUAL PORT RAM. The problem has been that 1 ram
had to deliver data to both the picture (Which can not wait
for its information.) and the 'blitter', that is not
possible in very high resolutions. Actually the V9958 can
only show SCREEN 5 with one VRAM bank, it have to have 2
banks to go up to resolutions as the Screen 7 and 8. On the
IBM-PC VGA cards they have NO 'blitter' and NO sprites. With
these 2 things VGA would never existed, with normal RAM. Most
VGA cards have to split up the VRAM in 4 or 8 banks to get
enough 'access time' just to show the screen resolution *
number of colours.

With the new DUAL PORT ram then V9990 have 1 port for the
Picture and 1 port for 'blitter', sprites and CPU access.
This gives the possibility of the high speeds and higher
screen resolutions in both dots and colours.


So, does V9990 have ANY MSX future ?

The first 3 days or so I did not get much sleep, I was busy 
converting XBASIC and Turbo R BASIC from V9958 to V9990.
After about 1 week I had most routines rewritten and they
were both faster and smaller ! I didnt belived it myself but
this chip is so damn brilliant. Take a basic command like the
"COPY file to (X,Y)" it is hopeless in screen 8 and even worse
in screen 6.

Each dot have to be read from the diskfile, masked   out
and written to the VDP, but before each dot the SUBROM first
have to set   and examine some status registers. ALL the
work is done by the CPU and not by the videoprocessor as it
should be. There are 4   different COPY routines in the
SUBROM, one for each screen   mode. The V9990 have a
hardware command that is much simpler to use. Just read the
data from the disk and write them directly to a VDP port, it
does the rest. The new routine is really   much faster.
The V9990 will distribute the data to the correct dots, no
masking to be done ! The V9990 command even IGNORES the
last bits in the right side of the rectangle you are copying
to, for those who dont know it then this is a MSX
speciallity. The V9990 fits the MSX to a fault not only in this
point but it also contains other commands fit for MSX BASIC
and BIOS.

Other basic commands that was getting much faster and smaller
was: PUT SPRITE, PAINT, PRINT #1, PUT KANJI.
Commands like LINE, PSET, POINT was not different in size.

The V9990 can simulate all MSX 2 and 2+ screen modes in matter
of the DOTS. The incompatibility starts with SPRITES and
with VDP registers.

The old sprite system was really bad, take a look on the PUT
SPRITE function in the SUBROM and you will understand
what I mean. To make 1 PUT SPRITE command takes about 200
VPEEKS and VPOKES and lots of calculations. Sprites on
the V9990 is very simple and more powerfull at the same time.

Sprites are now defined just as normal bitmapped graphics,
actually you can use normal graphic as spritedata. This
makes sprites much more usefull.
Sprites can have 1 of 4 palettes (1 palette have 16 colours) so
with sprites there can be up to 64 colours on the screen in
the 'GAME MODES'.
Sprites can move BEHIND the picture or between the 2 planes in
P1 mode, so the 2 planes can be huge sprites themselves.

Sprites on the V9990 are NOT   vram compatible with the
V9958, that would be imposible.

VDP registers are not compatible either, this was not possible
 as there have been so many improvements. If programmers
are using BASIC, XBASIC, C or Assembler with BIOS based
routines then there should be no problems. But Assembler
programs which writes   to VDP   registers and VRAM and
not using the BIOS will not work correctly.

The MSX standard does not permit anyone to access the vdp
registers directly.
The only legal and fast way to access the VRAM, bitmap graphics
area, is by setting up the VRAM ADR. with a BIOS routine
and then writing vram data directly to the I/O port which is
stored in ROM adr. 6-7. It is not allowed to use the VDP
regs to set up the adr. If this is done correctly then the 
V9990 is compatible.

Now 2 examples. Ex1 is the wrong one, Ex2 is the right one.

Ex1: Write 255 bytes from RAM to VRAM

LD HL,#0000
LD A,L
OUT (#99),A
LD A,H
OR #40
OUT (#99),A
LD HL,#A000
LD B,255
LD C,#98
OTIR
RET

This ex. will not work on the V9990, it should have read like 
this:

LD HL,#0000
CALL SetWr
LD HL,#A000
LD B,255
LD A,(#0006)
LD C,A
OTIR
RET


This is smaller in memory and much nicer to look at. 
The speed should not be a problem as the BLOCK transfer is the same.


The VRAM problem is the SPRITE control since the bytes used in
VRAM are located differently and 2 of the 4 bytes are
swapped and 1 have different meaning. Not an easy one to
solve.

The last problem is that the V9990 does not have SCREEN 0-3. In
the V9990 BASIC that I now have made there is a 64
char textmode, it also works in DOS. Program written in
BASIC with no 'dirty' commands like 'VDP', 'BASE' and VPOKE
to the sprite area would all work.
Programs written in XBASIC with the same limits will also work
in my V9990 XBASIC version, when its complete.

With a few rules for software devellopers then future programs
can work both on V9990 and on V9958. But as long as there is
no MSX with ONLY a V9990 then this should perhaps
not be nessesary.

The V9990 have some modes not mentioned in the manual. They
are:

Normal monitor:

192 x 240 with 2-32k colours
1024 x 212 with 16 colours (not sharp picture)

VGA monitor:

320 x 480 with 2 - 32k colours.
160 x 480 --!!--


Some people asked me to write about the Interlace on the V9990.
The interlace is different from the one on the V9958. 1 page
non-interlaced will be the upper half of the picture in
interlace mode.  So it is a more  logically and
usefull interlace. (No converting needed !)

My conclusion is that the V9990 is a very powerfull chip for
both Games and more Serious programs. Personally I dont
think that there will be a MSX with just the V9990 as
too many programmers have not been, and will not be,
desciplined enough to write programs that will work on it.
The ideal solution would be both V9958 and V9990
superimposed. However I think that the V9990 are having too
huge a potential to be ignored, even a 3.5 MHz MSX will be
able to gain from it.

To the people who are 100% against V9990 I just want toask: 
When did You last use screen 1-4?
MSX should not be standing at the 1985 level for 10 more years.