Baggers69 said:
Any ideas about what sort of hardware setup.
Sprite/Tile based or pixel based frame buffer
I'd be interested Jim
All Things Arcade Homebrew
- Thread starter guddler
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Any ideas about what sort of hardware setup.
Sprite/Tile based or pixel based frame buffer
I'd be interested Jim
Yeah, it would basically be a new arcade system, have simple retro style graphics hardware abilities ie lots of sprites, and dual play fields etc and able to run programs off SD card, to change the game played, thus allowing a new generation of arcade games to be made.
edit: it would have varying modes, 4 colour tiles/sprites, 16 colour tiles/sprites, 256 colour tiles/sprites, bitmap or tilemaps for backgrounds, I'l even tempted to throw in some Speccy/CPC/C64 modes, and C64 sprites, you'll even be able to have sprites on Speccy or CPC style displays.
PS if I keep switching between charmaps and tilemaps it's because I've called them charmaps for years, and the industry seem to insist they are tilemaps lol.
Baggers692015-02-21 11:01:32
edit: it would have varying modes, 4 colour tiles/sprites, 16 colour tiles/sprites, 256 colour tiles/sprites, bitmap or tilemaps for backgrounds, I'l even tempted to throw in some Speccy/CPC/C64 modes, and C64 sprites, you'll even be able to have sprites on Speccy or CPC style displays.
PS if I keep switching between charmaps and tilemaps it's because I've called them charmaps for years, and the industry seem to insist they are tilemaps lol.
Baggers692015-02-21 11:01:32
cmonkey said:
definitely +1 for retro 68000 would be nice
Baggers69 said:
All of the above sounds good to me.
Mitchell Gant
Active member
Baggers69 said:
Sounds like you want a board with a JAMMA edge connector, some joystick/button inputs and RGB/Sync and sound out, and probably an FPGA and some memory with an SD card slot. Then you could have various classic CPUs and change the hardware configuration to suit within reason.
I've been experimenting a bit myself with a cheap Cyclone 2 FPGA board from EBay. I've managed to make an 8 colour 15KHz/60Hz video output (actually started as a monitor test pattern generator) with a 6502 VHDL CPU core from OpenCores. It has 2K ROM and 2K RAM and the start of a character ROM, but that doesn't work properly yet. The limit is the Cyclone 2 FPGA only has less than 16K on it, and the board has no other memory on there, so fairly limited.
I was dead chuffed this week when I managed to get the 6502 running some interrupt code that moved a black line down my colour bars test background. I was toying with attempting some Atari classic game emulation next maybe, just to see where it took me.
Does it defeat the idea of homebrew on arcade hardware though if new tech is used? Not sure I know an answer to that myself.
You do realise a board like this is already in developement in the US... based on an ARM processor.
The guys who are making Sky Curser are building a Jamma board that can be used for homebrew games. Should be very interesting when it happens...
The guys who are making Sky Curser are building a Jamma board that can be used for homebrew games. Should be very interesting when it happens...
I'm getting slightly interested in developing a few simple 8-bit style games for my young kids to play and enjoy on a MAME setup. I did some home-brew game development back in the late 80s, and am sincerely hoping dev tools are a lot easier!
Any recommendations on easy-to-use (apart from SkyCurser)??
Any recommendations on easy-to-use (apart from SkyCurser)??
Need to pick a target board that's got plenty of written up documentation for thing's like memory maps and io and also that supports the features you want like tilemaps, scrolling and hardware sprites. You should also be able to look at the source in mame to get some idea.
It depends on what effort you want to put in initially to understand the hardware.
I'm using pacman hardware I've got some info on the hardware setup that helps and Adrian got me going with his hardware boot code.
It depends on what effort you want to put in initially to understand the hardware.
I'm using pacman hardware I've got some info on the hardware setup that helps and Adrian got me going with his hardware boot code.
Been messing around with the Pacman hardware, got quite a nice tool chain going using a NES chr editor for tiles and sprites, the .chr file is automatically converted to the Pacman tile/sprite formats each time I build the project.
This document was invaluable https://www.lomont.org/software/games/pacman/PacmanEmulation.pdf
...along with of course Hurray Banana's source code for Ghost Hunt. Early days yet and I'm learning Z80 at the same time I as I'm a C64/2600 guy usually.
Wondering if there's anything similar out there for the Galaxian hardware, I like the idea of more sprites to throw around....
arlasoft2023-01-01 18:55:10
This document was invaluable https://www.lomont.org/software/games/pacman/PacmanEmulation.pdf
...along with of course Hurray Banana's source code for Ghost Hunt. Early days yet and I'm learning Z80 at the same time I as I'm a C64/2600 guy usually.
Wondering if there's anything similar out there for the Galaxian hardware, I like the idea of more sprites to throw around....
arlasoft2023-01-01 18:55:10