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I finally got my 8253 timer project finished. One minor hurdle that I didn't anticipate is that MESS's abstraction of the host computer's soundcard and its emulated CPU aren't synchronized. The soundcard is supposed to request samples from the emulated CPU at 44.1KHz, but according to the emulated CPU it seems to be doing it slightly faster than that (or the emulated CPU is running slightly slow by the soundcard's standard) so my buffer keeps underrunning.

The way to fix this is to tell the CPU to generate samples at a slightly higher rate (according to its clock) so that the soundcard and the CPU stay in sync. The trouble is, I don't know exactly how much faster the soundcard is than the CPU. Besides which, it seems to fluctuate and the ratio may even be completely different on a different machine.

The next thing I tried was dynamically adjusting the sample rate 60 times a second to the value which was calculated for the previous time-period. The problem with this was that the variations in the sample rate could sometimes be quite large, and the resulting "flutter" of the emulated computer's soundtrack sounded absolutely awful. Also, the buffer might now be slightly less full than optimal (leaving little room for further error) or slightly more full than optimal (causing the soundtrack to "lag" behind the graphics a bit). Clearly the most elegant way to solve this would be to smooth out these variations in such a way that the average sample rate over long time would be correct.

Next, I set up a running total of the "drift" time, and adjusted the sample rate in proportion to this. Of course, this caused the sample rate to oscillate around the correct value - I needed some damping to remove "energy" from the system. A couple of pages of calculations later I had modelled the system with a second order differential equation and solved for the critical damping value. After some tweaking of the buffer length and time-constant values it now works wonderfully - no buffer underruns, no noticable flutter and the graphics and sound are fairly well synchronized.

The only problem now is the aliasing - the 8253 timer in the PC can generate frequencies of up to almost 600KHz, and because of the rather unscientific way I'm downsampling that high-frequency waveform down to 44,100Hz (roughly) all the harmonics too high for the soundcard to play are aliased down to frequencies between 0 and 22,050KHz (roughly) so when you attempt to play a square wave, you get a whole pile of harmonics you weren't expecting and it sounds rather less than perfect. Since the sampling rate drifts up and down, playing a constant high-pitched tone makes all sorts of swooping noises. I wonder if it would be feasable to use a proper finite impulse response filter to downsample while removing all the frequencies that are too high-pitched to play...

For those rare few of you for who are not interested in all this geek stuff, here are some rather spectacular mazes.

One of my ongoing projects is getting old computer games (particularly the old Windmill Software games) to run properly on modern hardware. One technique for doing this that I have recently been experimenting with is emulation - specifically, the Multiple Emulator Super System. This is almost there, as it features cycle-exact emulation of an 8088 processor and hardware-level emulation of a CGA card, thus getting the graphics and speed just right for these old games.

The one place MESS falls down is its emulation of the 8253 Programmable Interval Timer. This small but very important circuit exists almost unchanged in every PC ever made (as well as a number of other computers such as the Telenova Compis, the INDATA DAI, the Sharp MZ-700 and the Tesla PMD-85).

In modern operating systems, the 8253 is used by the task scheduler to interrupt whatever the machine is currently doing so that another program can get a chance at running, but these old games used it for advanced sound effects and "random" number generation. As such, they generally pushed it to the limits of its capabilities, so a very accurate emulation is needed to get these games to work properly.

The 8253 is well documented but unfortunately (though understandably) all the documentation available is written for people who want to program the thing or build a computer a which uses it, rather than for people who want to duplicate its functionality in an emulator. So there are a number of obscure edge-cases like "what happens if you do x, but half way through you do y" which aren't documented. In the interests of accuracy, I want to get these edge cases to work just as they would on the real hardware.

I'm finding myself having to do some real science to figure out the internals of this chip - formulating hypotheses and devising and running experiments to prove or disprove these hypotheses, and gradually constructing a "grand unified theory of the 8253" (if you will). Sometimes it's pretty straightforward, but other times tne observations must be made indirectly. For example, some of these experiments require timing as accurate as a millionth of a second, but this is a fraction of the time it takes to actually read data from or write data to the device in question. So the only way to do these experiments is to fire a whole load of data at the chip ("tuned" to maximize the probability of creating the desired event), record what comes back and then sort through the results (sometimes using statistical methods) to figure out if the edge case that I'm trying to reproduce actually happened, and if so what the result was. If the experiment is run enough times, hopefully the event I'm looking for will actually happen. It's quite a lot like doing high energy particle physics, except I'm searching for logic gates instead of Higgs bosons.

The bathroom sink was draining really slowly, so I decided to remove the U-bend and clean it out. You would not believe the evil things that lurked in there - a foul-smelling black, grey and green sludge held together with human hair. I would have taken a picture of it, but it was so unholy I doubt it would show up in photographs (like vampires in that respect). Hours and a long hot shower later, I still feel dirty.