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. :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Micro:Bit and SPI display

I want to explore the full potential of the BBC Micro:bits my school has. Making rock-paper-scissors games and the like is all well and good, and the students love it (for the most part), but it always feels a little bit gimmicky.  But when students really get engaged and suggest ideas for them (e.g. games, compass display), it all gets a little bit cramped and feels like it could  kinda  work, but not really . Then I found out that all the tiny strips on the edge are actually GPIO pins, not just the fat 0, 1 and 2 ones.  Since then, I've wanted to explore what I can do with it. Hence, over the last few days I have been trying to get the microbit to control a TFT display. I first went for this 2.4" display with a touchscreen.  The SPI interface is just for the microSD, not for the screen but I didn't think that would be a problem because the micro:bit has so many pins.  After much frustration, I discovered that there are many of the pins you can't reliably use extern
Read more

DCS World with TrackIR under Ubuntu

This is a record of my experience of setting this up.  It's meant more as a record for my future self than a tutorial, but maybe somebody will find it useful. 1 - Install DCS First step, install DCS World via the Steam client as normal.  2 - Install LinuxTrack Linuxtrack Download here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Downloads   Instructions here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/universal-Linuxtrack-package   Using the gui (ltr_gui) requires qt4 libraries, which I could not find in my standard Ubuntu repositories, so I had to use the ppa instructions here: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2020/07/install-qt4-ubuntu-20-04 Run ltr_gui from linuxtrack's bin directory to check everything works so far before moving on to get it running under Proton.  3 - Install LinuxTrack into the DCS World prefix NOTE: Attempting to install for Wine games WON'T WORK e.g. here https://github-wiki-see.page/m/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Wine-Games   This is because Ste
Read more

Cardboard Mock-up of USB Joystick

Image
For years now (literally years ), I have been playing around with the idea of making a USB joystick.  You may have seen my previous experiment in building a throttle control . I wanted to use a similar idea to the throttle, taking the angular motion of the handle and magnify it when applying it to the potentiometer.  e.g. move the handle through 45 degrees and the potentiometer gets moved through 90 degrees. I also wanted it anchored at the rear, so I can build a mount to attach it to my computer chair. In the video you can see a cardboard mock-up I made today.  I'm amazed it worked at all, but it even provides a solid foundation for designing the proper plywood one. The process of making a cardboard mock-up was really useful.  There were three fatal flaws in my sketch design which I would not have found out until I tried to make it: Pushing the joystick left/right when it was already pulled full back makes it catch on the rear support. The internal supports in the
Read more