New Sprite Engine

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uze6666
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New Sprite Engine

Post by uze6666 »

Here's a teaser from the next software rev. The balls and the paddle makes 32 simultaneous sprites. With up to four per scan lines (for the moment). The horizontal resolution is a bit reduced since it now take 10 clocks per pixel instead of 6 with the current tile-only engine.

Image

It's worth noting that even with the sprites, the main game still has *the same* amount of free CPU left as before! That's because I used the wasted "alignment" cycles (NOPs) used while rendering each frame.

Scrolling is gonna be tricky, but I know there's still juice in this little beast.

Cheers!

Uze
psyjax
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by psyjax »

That is excellent!

I can't wait to see what you can get out of the 128 :)
CompMan
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by CompMan »

I agree, when the new 128 comes out throw it and see if it's better.

Compman
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uze6666
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by uze6666 »

Btw, it 1284, not 128...the 4 makes all the difference! ;)
CompMan
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by CompMan »

Oh yea sorry, I mean 1284

Compman
Tinctu
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by Tinctu »

That Arkanoid looks awesome!
6845
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by 6845 »

Yeah, a console without Sprites is surely not a console.
when I see your Sprite demo, the characters are really like a VIC 20, very big in horizontal..
Its a hard work to do this all in an AVR i know.

Did you ever think about to add simply another atmega644 for drawing just the Sprites ?
you take the 8 bit RGB and put in to two 74HCT157 and now you can draw the Sprites over the graphic from the first AVR.
the select of 157 you can drive with an 8bit OR, so if any Pixel is set in the sprite port, the 157 swith the port to the RGBDAC.
To sync the second (spritecontroller) you use compsync and an serialport (clk,data,strobe) for communicating in the VBLANK Aera...

You are completly free with this approach and get dual cpu power.

What u think ?

M6845
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uze6666
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by uze6666 »

There's just so much we can do with such an MCU. Sure, I could have put 2 Megas for the gfx and add another one for the sound and also add external RAM for a frame buffer, etc etc. Anyway that has already been done several times. Just look in YouTube.

This multi cpu was the original idea, but when I saw the size an sheer complexity of the hardware I said to myself: who the hell would like to assemble that!!! Here's a pic from my protoboard (I ripped some chips before taking that picture, so there was even more):

Image

As mentioned in another topic, some said why no go then with a Propeller or an ARM7 or even faster? Well, it is no more of a challenge then and, moreover, the whole thing loose a lot of its appeal: simplicity!

That said, nothing prevents you or others to build just what you mentioned.

Cheers,

Uze
CompMan
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by CompMan »

uze6666 wrote:Well, it is no more of a challenge then and, moreover, the whole thing loose a lot of its appeal: simplicity!
I agree, the simplicity of the Uzebox is what makes it so much better then the other systems. It also allows a better programming challenge just like the lack of memory in the good old days. When the 1284 comes out we will have a better system but it won't be crazy amounts of power. Just a small upgrade.

Anyways, KEEP IT SIMPLE.

Compman
havok1919
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Re: New Sprite Engine

Post by havok1919 »

CompMan wrote:
uze6666 wrote:I agree, the simplicity of the Uzebox is what makes it so much better then the other systems. It also allows a better programming challenge just like the lack of memory in the good old days. When the 1284 comes out we will have a better system but it won't be crazy amounts of power. Just a small upgrade.
I agree-- it's two off the shelf IC's. The schematic doesn't even fill one sheet of paper. The surface mount design fits on a 1.5 square inch PCB (~9.5 sq/cm?). You could make one using RGB only with <16 parts. ...and you could probably solder those directly to the pins on a DIP packaged part-- no PCB required. ;-)

I guess we can think of the '644 as the VIC-20 and the '1284 can be the C-64...

Other than not being available over here in hobbiest circles, we've used some little microcontrollers from SunPlus that are a *one* chip game console. Audio/video (with NTSC and PAL encoders), memory, and a (proprietary) 16-bit RISC CPU on one die. That's what's inside a lot of the plug-n-play TV games (the EA Madden/NHL one for example uses it).

-Clay
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