Games in progress for RC2014 with OLED screen.

he OLED screen that Quazar makes for the Z80-based RC2014 is 128 x 32 pixels, a wide and thin format. The way that you send data (bytes being vertical) makes it good for smooth sideways scrolling.

I did this a while ago and as usual I'd almost finished when I moved onto something else. It's written using Forth, which I really love. In return for a small sacrifice in performance (according to Leo Brodie's book, it can be almost as fast as assembly) you get some very helpful features. For example, numbers are 16-bit signed (in the implementation I use), the stack makes it very easy to pass parameters in and out when calling words, and I like the way it makes me structure a program. It forces you to start with the small building blocks.

So it is with some joy that I've returned to the dino game and started a new tunnel game.

Again the screen format is well-suited to this type of thing. For the Dino game I made myself a box with two arcade buttons (he jumps and ducks) and so I'm using the two-button-controller again. I'm using the i/o registers of the YM chip for input, so I may write my music driver in Forth and add sound/music to this game. it's a shame that it's hard to capture on camera the beauty of the OLED display.

With a single-pixel shift per frame it's moving silky-smoothly although at quite a pedestrian pace. I'll probably end up moving two pixels at a time.

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RC2024/10 - my entry

A while ago I made this MIDI module for RC2014: It works but a better design would have its own serial chip and port decoding. As it is, it provides the MIDI interface and a clock signal for the second SIO2 serial port. This means that it requires a little setting up and will only work for RC2014s with an SIO2 (and port B not already used). I think people might reasonably expect it to be plug-and-play and self-contained, ie do all the serial itself. My challenge to myself is to: learn how to connect a serial chip (probably 68B50 ACIA) to receive the incoming MIDI and to serialise outgoing MIDI design the module, including the port decoding write a library so that it can easily be used on any RC2014. Potential applications include a MIDI sequencer and using incoming MIDI to trigger notes on the AY or SID sound chips. Entering the Retro Challenge 2024 (aka RC2024/10) has given me an incentive to get on with this! I'm happy to see several more entries in the RC2014 category, includ

How to convert images for TMS9918A graphics on the RC2014

For me, graphics capability is essential for an 8-bit computer. My graphics chip of choice for the RC2014 is the very capable TMS9918A. It has 15 colours, sprites, several modes and a max resolution of 256x192. It makes arcade-style games possible, such as Tut-Tut above. I enjoy simply displaying images and have a bunch on my CF card (my 'hard drive') and have written image viewer and slideshow apps to display them. Some useful links: Convert9918 Tutorial of Convert9918's settings Multipaint J B Langston's TMS9918A video module my own TMSEMU video module my respository of TMS9918A software, games and .s2/.sc3 images Image conversion I did dabble in writing my own utility to convert .png images but then settled on the Multipaint app which can open a png in a MSX 'screen 2', allow you to tidy it up with paint tools and save as a .sc2 file. (An sc2 file is little more than a video-memory dump and so it's easy to blast that back into vram to display the image.

IM53 8080 birthday cake

Each year I've been trying to get more creative with ideas for Spencer's birthday cake. The plan this year was to incorporate LEDs in place of candles. I eventually settled on an Altair / IMSAI / PDP -style computer since those are the type of computers that inspired his RC2014. The IMSAI 8080 has the most colourful switches as well as a name that I could twist. The thought that it could show randomly flashing lights (as if the computer were running) and that it could also play a game of 'kill the bit' was very appealing. A plan formed to use a capacitive touch pad on the cake itself. The first job is to bake the fruitcake. I often use a 7" square tin and one of those cut in half and rearranged makes a cake of suitable proportions. Even after taking a slice off the faces to make them nice and square, there are still some rounded corners, so after putting on the marzipan, I used more marzipan as a filler to flatten the whole thing. Even though I wanted to end up w

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