c64cast v0.2.1

Downloads

• 📘 c64cast User's Guide 0.2.1 (PDF)
  — 10 chapters, read in order, starting from nothing.
• 📕 c64cast Programmer's Reference Guide 0.2.1 (PDF)
  — every scene, knob and register, with nine generated appendices.
• 🎛️ c64cast Performance Card 0.2.1 (PDF)
  — two pages for the desk next to the controller.
• 📦 c64cast-0.2.1-py3-none-any.whl
  · c64cast-0.2.1.tar.gz
  — or just uv tool install 'c64cast[all]'
  (PyPI).

---

Added

• The documentation is a website.
  kfox.github.io/c64cast publishes all three
  books — User's Guide, Programmer's Reference Guide, Performance Card — plus
  the caveats, troubleshooting and extending notes, rendered from the same
  Markdown the PDFs are set from and republished on every push to main. Each
  book gets a contents page, a chapter sidebar, prev/next paging and a link to
  its typeset PDF; a section link resolves identically on github.com, in the
  PDF and on the site, because all three use GitHub's own anchor rule. The
  renderer (scripts/build_site.py) is stdlib-only and shares its reading of
  the Markdown — and every check that reading makes — with the PDF builder, so
  the two cannot disagree about what a page says. make site builds it
  locally; a pull request now proves every book still renders, which previously
  nothing did until release day.

• Every book has a permanent download link. A release now carries each PDF
  twice — c64cast-users-guide-X.Y.Z.pdf as before, and an unversioned
  c64cast-users-guide.pdf — so
  https://github.com/kfox/c64cast/releases/latest/download/c64cast-users-guide.pdf
  (and the same for c64cast-reference-guide.pdf and
  c64cast-performance-card.pdf) always serves the current release. The README
  links all three that way; every past release keeps its version-stamped copy.

• --doctor names the opencv build that actually loaded. Every opencv
  wheel — plain, contrib, and the headless variants — unpacks into the same
  cv2/ directory under a different distribution name, so an installer will
  co-install several and the last one written wins. Installing the vision
  extra (or all) brings opencv-contrib-python along with mediapipe, which
  means the opencv-python version c64cast pins is not the one that runs, and
  nothing said so. ENVIRONMENT now reports the build in place, flags it when
  more than one distribution is providing cv2, and warns when the winner is a
  headless wheel — the cause of [preview] opening no window.

Fixed

• DAC audio can no longer come up silent for a whole session. On some
  machines a run would play no audio at all from the first frame to the last —
  never a dropout, never a recovery, and the video also ran noticeably fast.
  Three writes start the NMI audio consumer, and the write transport is built to
  absorb a dropped write rather than fail loudly; if any of the three went
  missing the consumer never started, and nothing on the host noticed (the fast
  playback was the pacing loop correctly chasing a reader that never read). The
  bring-up now checks that the consumer actually started and re-sends the writes
  if it didn't, up to five times, logging when a retry was needed and warning
  outright if it never takes. A consumer that dies mid-session also warns now
  instead of playing out as unexplained silence. --calibrate-dac uses the same
  verified bring-up, so a run can no longer spend 50 seconds measuring nothing.

• Ensemble systems no longer record over each other. [recording].path
  cascaded from the master like the rest of the section, so every system in a
  wall opened a cv2.VideoWriter on one file and finished with a single
  truncated recording — silently, since the writers have no way to detect the
  collision. path is now per-system like ultimate64.url: leave it unset and
  each system writes recording-<system>.mp4; set it and that path is used as
  written. enabled still cascades, so recording a whole wall is still one
  key. --doctor reports an error if two systems are pointed at one file
  explicitly.

• --doctor findings can no longer go missing. The report printed only
  those categories named in a hard-coded list, so a check reporting under any
  other name returned findings that never reached the screen — indistinguishable
  from passing. Unlisted categories now print after the known ones.

• Corrected the troubleshooting advice for a shadowed opencv, which prescribed
  reinstalling c64cast[all] — the install that causes the shadowing.

Changed

• The README is a landing page again. It had grown a reference section for
  each surface it introduced — the full keyboard table with its chord
  precedence rules, nine config-discovery commands, the machine-settings
  precedence, the SID-player rationale — all of which the books now state
  properly, from the code. Those are cut down to what someone deciding whether
  to install this needs, and the space goes to what was missing: the pixel
  effect chain (four of the eight effects were listed, and the chain not at
  all), the live performance surfaces (a clip grid, a beat grid, pad LEDs,
  looks and the /perf console had no mention outside the docs list), audio
  files as quick-playback arguments, the bitmap spectrum overlay, and the
  character ROM your first run reads off your own machine.