New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

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....

T 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...