Uzebox Forums

I would be if I were better at communication in general.

Ha! That's how I feel about myself too. I blame the internet for my lack of decent English skills.

We should just do what the Blender Art Magazine does and have a collection of tutorials put into pdf form.


>J

Reading through the free parts of the manual (available from the site) it looks like the video modes support a lot less features than those on uzebox; notably a limit of only 3 8x8 sprites in most of the modes, however it does have bitmapped modes (even though they're only 80x112 pixels :-p). It also seemed to indicate only vertical scrolling in tile maps - although I realise these are relatively new features of uzebox they could also have been implemented on XGS and the manual just needs updating.

I like the fact the manual pulls all the useful stuff together; I've read a lot of his books before and they're quite easy to read, I definitely think uzebox could do with something like the manual (in ebook form - who reads physical books anymore? :-p)

I just don't feel the magic with the XGS that I do with uzebox; I dunno what it is, but the XGS just feels all closed and commercial, with the uzebox all I can think about is rolling my own and being proud of it :-p. I still think the shot of the usebox on the orange wirewrap board looks better than the finished PCB kits but no-ones done a black PCB yet (I always loved XFX's components due to their black PCBs :-p).

I'm kind of always interested in new stuff to mess around with, even to the extent that I don't finish messing around with the old stuff first. (Since the Uzebox I have also acquired a Dingoo A320, which I have also mostly failed to do anything with.)

I've always been put off the XGS systems by the price, though. I had to think twice - and still wait for a moment of weakness - before getting the Dingoo, and that's quite a bit cheaper, although not really the same kind of thing at all. The "advantage" of the Uzebox is that you can get it in much smaller increments, which don't feel so painful.

I'd never seen the media page before:

http://www.xgamestation.com/media.php

Looks like he went through some serious prototyping stages, right from Z80 to FPGA, Arm, and now onto PIC/AVR and Propeller.

lightfoot256 wrote: Looks like he went through some serious prototyping stages, right from Z80 to FPGA, Arm, and now onto PIC/AVR and Propeller.

Andre's book "Black Art of Video Game Console Design" shows his early Z80, 6502 and 6809 designs, as well as the SX28 (PIC micro lookalike) console design used for the XGamestation Pico console. But I found it strange that the Z80, 6503 and 6809 designs didn't have any video sub-systems but other than that the book is a very good read, full of useful snippets of information and would recommend it to anyone interested the hardware side of video consoles.

R.I.P XGamestation. Seems Andre has thrown the towel in 2016.

Makes me think of all we accomplished since the launch almost 10 years ago...who would have tough. Pretty awesome! And since I still ship about 100+ kits year-over-year to Adafruit I reckon interest is still pretty good (even if it's totally buried in their thousand of products inventory ).

A lot of good guys around here and that makes all the difference in the fun and motivation. I don't think XGS even in it's prime ever matched the community here. Uzebox is a pretty amazing little story. Eh, I must believe there is more to come!

Andre is still around, he has a new website http://www.ic0nstrux.com/

Long live Atmega consoles!!