XMega-Uzebox ideas

Discuss anything not related to the current Uzebox design like successors and other open source gaming hardware
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: XMega-Uzebox ideas

Post by D3thAdd3r »

I have always liked the multiprocessor designs, and I do not have a real logical reason to, just seems neat to me.

I still wonder if a 1284 over volted and clocked to 10*NTSC would be able to bitbang video without the AD725. Forget which Arduino console it is, but this has been done on less with decent color and resolution; though I believe composite only as it took advantage of something intrinsic to that to make color artifacts.

Dual ported ram would make a 3 chip solution which might actually allow near parallel processing. Interchip communication could probably be kept very low even without the ram, if one relied on preloading resources to the output chip, lock stepped on the same oscillator, and only sent it display lists during a specific timing interval. Then it is easy to avoid stalls, and only resource loads at level change or such, would be slow. Does that seem viable? It seems like a parallel Uzebox to me, even doing more bitbanging than the original if that AD725 can go.
nono34
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Re: XMega-Uzebox ideas

Post by nono34 »

HI
OF course there is several microcontroller with several prices lol for me it seems that the atsam4S16B is the best price performance.

what do you think about?
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Jubatian
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Re: XMega-Uzebox ideas

Post by Jubatian »

nono34 wrote: Tue Jun 05, 2018 11:10 am HI
OF course there is several microcontroller with several prices lol for me it seems that the atsam4S16B is the best price performance.

what do you think about?
If you are more interested in a 32 bitter, take a look at Makapuf's BitBox console, which is a quite powerful one, and you can have high-resolution VGA with it :) Otherwise Matej just posted one: uGame, which is nice if you like Python (it apparently runs a Python interpreter), or Pokitto which is the easiest to program in C++ (as its kernel provides a C++ interface).
nono34
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Re: XMega-Uzebox ideas

Post by nono34 »

hi

for the moment i think that the uzebox is better because there is maximun options particularly the sd card and possibility of video demo

i will try uzebox first
thank you
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Jubatian
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Re: XMega-Uzebox ideas

Post by Jubatian »

nono34 wrote: Tue Jun 05, 2018 6:16 pmhi

for the moment i think that the uzebox is better because there is maximun options particularly the sd card and possibility of video demo

i will try uzebox first
thank you
We have many games for sure, already, and the bootloader is quite robust and easy to use, its certainly not hard to code some simple game and see it running on the real hardware! The Uzebox also has higher resolution typically than the handhelds. However memory is little, and CPU is sometimes limited (for simple games this mostly shows first in the amount of sprites you can realize). If you add the 128Kbyte SPI RAM, the Uzebox becomes a lot more powerful, although we are still only experimenting with that.

For video, the BitBox can do it: It even has Dragon's Lair, the old LaserDisc game, which basically plays video segments. Not that UzeBox doesn't have something similar: We have Tornado 2000, true it doesn't look like something playing video, but the technique is the same, the background are frames streamed from the SD card.

Just mentioning these, try what you like most, certainly all opensource projects benefit from a bit of extra kick, more games!

A bit of extra on the side of Uzebox is the cabability of emulation: We have a cycle perfect emulator capable to run games even within a web browser (you can try any of the games from the Wiki), which certainly beats just about all the 32 bitters (which are just too powerful to accomplish this).
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