Picante: Transparency and Text

Picante: Basic Graphics Features Complete!

The fundamental graphics feature set is there: 

  • clearing the screen
  • drawing 32x32 bitmaps with optional transparent colour index
  • drawing coloured text from bitmap font

All features are accessible via python script and clip against the screen edge.

It's not yet built to be robust - I was having too much fun to bother writing exhaustive error checking.

Whilst the basic design is meant to be fairly speedy without eating too much RAM, there's plenty more that can still be done to optimise it.

Blitting:


The tiles are processed from a single bitmap, but blitted individually (no fast tilemap feature yet).  It runs at about 15fps, all off a single core. 

 

Text:

The text is processed from a png into a 1bpp binary format for the picante engine to load.  This runs at about ~20fps.

It's designed to be able to handle any font up to 8x16px, but I've only tested it with the 3x5 tom-thumb font so far.  The small screen really needs something bigger!

 

Next steps:

Graphically, I could try to shift processing over to the second core, I could add 16x16 blitting, built-in tilemap support, ... the list goes on.  

I've also got an I2S audio module with headphone jack to connect up and get working.  I'm hoping to get some kind of software synthesiser working, loosely based on the C64's SID chip.

For now though, I'm going to sit back and enjoy repeatedly rerunning these videos. :)

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