diegzumillo wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 8:26 pm
I played that one and it is inspiring! I hope I don't sound too 'whiny' here, as I do appreciate uzebox for the amazing thing it is and I'm sure a lot can be accomplished. My own personal expectations and preferences that I'm sharing here are totally subjective and arbitrary, really, and not criticism. But I'm sharing them anyway
I have a game idea that could be accomplished with very little. A prince of persia-like game. No camera movement needed, no need to separate things from background and foreground or gui, and very few sprites at a time.
Thanks!
If you really want mostly Prince of Persia, that really doesn't take too much. For the simplest path, you could use Mode 3 (as everyone is using it), since Prince of Persia has at most two sprites on one screen (as far as I remember, assuming you realize collectible items such as potions by tiles), it should fit well within Mode 3's limitations even with larger sprites.
If you want to jump in something more complex, then
Mode 74, the video mode which Flight of a Dragon uses (true that there are many things customized in that game, however Mode 74 is used as-is: the graphics techniques you see in the game are possible with the Mode 74 within the Uzebox repo). It is a little rough to start as the mode is quite complex. There is another game using this mode:
Stormforce, which also has its source published.
Mode 3 is easier in that regard too that pixels are not that much wide, so using existing graphics designed for square pixels doesn't look too bad. Especially if you use the extended resolution option (256 pixels wide instead of 240). For Mode 74, you would have to pixel yourself, or possibly use graphics designed for Commodore 64's Multicolor mode (the pixel aspect ratio of Mode 74 is the same as an NTSC Commodore 64's in Multicolor).
L4rry wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 7:57 pmIf we start adding co-processors, more RAM and additional hardware, why stop there? Just use Unity or UE4 then to target high end GPU 's . Maybe my counter example is too extreme, but, I would suggest targeting the standard uzebox hardware and video modes to see if you can come up with something interesting. It really is worth while
I mostly started on my 2x1284 idea due to that the Uzebox is overclocked. I am being a little pushed around for doing this, I mean messing around with something disregarding the intended specs in this manner. So how to solve this? At 20MHz you normally can't do such graphics like at 28,6MHz. What is the biggest bottleneck there? Loading from ROM and swithcing between ROM & RAM tiles! So lets throw a 1284 at the problem which has 16K of RAM. But eww, the Uzebox is already CPU limited due to audio & blitting at 28,6MHz... And I found some wicked graphics modes which require utilizing the full 128K of ROM. Could I make it a GPU then to allow for sane C programming on another AVR for a full frame instead of just the VBlank? Sure! Then I was like wow, just how much raw 8 bit power this packs, still all DIPs!
(In the current design, you could just solder together two 1284's side by side to get the core of this system, so it isn't even complex to wire it)
Anyway, sure the Uzebox is interesting on its own, especially the "let's see what can be done in 60Kbytes" aspect!