Uzebox hardware spin-off idea

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Flamore
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Uzebox hardware spin-off idea

Post by Flamore »

Hi, since i noticed the flaws of the current design. I thought why shouldn't Uzebox be remastered to work on not a microcontroller, but a SoC. Like the ESP32, it's got half a megabyte of ram and 4-16 mb flash, and wifi/bt capabilities. The ESP32 would have enough horsepower (40-240 mhz) to host a virtual machine to play games. Like a 6502 emulator, or an AVR one to be backwards compatibile with the OG Uzebox, not to mention that many video modes could be added and the kernel would be able to grow constantly. It also supports external ram (to 4 mb), external flash and has a filesystem. But the question is, would anyone be up for it.

Peace.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Uzebox hardware spin-off idea

Post by D3thAdd3r »

I think ESP32 could be an interesting game console. It is a huge step up in power which is cool, but I also feel that is the main flaw for me. It is not interesting to make small games run on big hardware, because there is no challenge or interesting solutions required. Then you need to make bigger games to push the limits, but bigger games quickly get past what a single hobbyist developer is going to finish. Of course, can it run DooM? That would be neat. I truly feel that is the reason the many 32 bit chips available don't see any actual 32 bit quality open source games developed. It's close enough to PC, why not make PC games.
Flamore
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Re: Uzebox hardware spin-off idea

Post by Flamore »

As i said, if it ran a 6502 VM it could be stuck to 64 KB without bank switching. And about pc games is the thing that you don't get the satisfaction of soldering the hardware together. And yes, it can run doom (15/20ish fps i think)
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Uzebox hardware spin-off idea

Post by D3thAdd3r »

That could be a cool idea. Before I discovered Uzebox I had found RetroWiz and was very interested in the concept. Not enough work had been done there and it was not easy enough to coordinate with others, so I lost interest. Realistically if someone made a site, had lots available for sale, some example games, etc. I do think an ESP32 console could take off.
Flamore
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Re: Uzebox hardware spin-off idea

Post by Flamore »

I guess i should get to work then :P
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Artcfox
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Re: Uzebox hardware spin-off idea

Post by Artcfox »

D3thAdd3r pretty much summed up my feelings as well. I went 20 years as a software engineer without ever making a game, and then I discovered the Uzebox, and having all of its limitations made it much easier for me to settle on an idea and follow it through. I'm not terribly good with pixel art, but with small enough sprites and a limited color palette, I can pretty much brute-force things until they look okay to me. The same with the music, I can use Rosegarden to drop some notes in a sequence, convert the resulting MIDI and then use trail-and-error with various patches until I get something that I like the sound of. Having such limited memory and space forces me to get really creative in order to shrink down my wild and crazy ideas until they can run on the microcontroller.

Do I wish that it was possible to use an ATmega1284 instead of an ATmega644? Sure! But I'm not sure how much that would actually be able to buy me for what I would want it for, because with mode 3 with scrolling, I'm already close to being CPU-bound for the blitting.
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