GameToy hardware project

These pages describe a sort of blog-ish time log on my 'GameToy' hardware project (stalled indefinitely).

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June 15th, 2006 - all sorts

Took a couple of day's break, reading some Terry Prattchett and stuff.

I hate audio. I postponed it a bit, and wrote a small game.

The screenshot above is from simulation; I refactored the source base so that the non-hardware specific stuff can compile on both the real hardware and under SDL.

Grab the game here for windows. The blurring effect is fairly accurate, so it shows how the fast-flying bullets are almost completely transparent.

Writing the cross-platform code was helpful also in finding some previously unfound bugs, such as clipping issues. I've also written audio output, but it's so horrible right now that it's been left out from the above windows build.

Oh, cursors move the ship and pressing A is fire (Z would be the second fire, but it's unused). There's auto-fire, so you don't need to kill your keyboard (or my prototype). The asteroids get killed on the fourth hit. Each killed asteroid gives you 10 points, and each escaping one takes one point.

Also did some benchmarking yesterday. When clearing the screen, I can output some 32 sprites at 50Hz, or some 140 sprites at 25Hz, which is the frame rate I'm aiming at. The LCD is so bad that I'd probably get away with 10Hz.. all of these with pure C code; rewriting the sprite routines in assembler would most likely improve matters considerably.

Comments are appreciated.