Best Tile/Sprite Driver for 3.5" LCD

awesomeduck

Does anyone have any experience with the Parallax 3.5" Color LCD display and the Hydra/Prop? The Hydra book is pretty specific that the tile driver in the Pac Man like demo is not designed for work with LCDs. I was wondering if anyone has had any luck getting the Parallax display running with 8 or more sprites.
Thanks for any help.

Baggers

awesomeduck, I think ( someone please correct me if i'm wrong ) the LCD is composite in, and should therefore work with most of the drivers we have available now in obex and on the forum [noparse]:D[/noparse]
as for sprites, are you wanting real sprites, as in their own palettes, etc, and what size sprites? there are a few that have been done on the forum and posted.
DodgyKong for instance has more than 8 16x16 sprites and that should work on the LCD.

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awesomeduck

Update:
I have been playing with the Parallax 3.5" LCD and find that some of the games on the Hyrda CD look great, others ok, and some do not sync. Kong looks ok. The Pacman like tile and sprite demos look ok, but oddly the dots (no pixels, the dots in the game that the pacman eats) near the center of the screen have some ghosting. Each dot in the middle area of the screen ends up looking like two dots.

Has anyone tuned the HEL tile and sprite driver for the LCD?

The Kong driver would be ideal, but I am having a hard time following the code. I am hoping to use a sprite and tile setup not for a game, but for a real time data display that shows lots of moving meters/indicators. The 8 x 8 pixel tiles on Kong would be ideal, but if anyone has any other thoughts I am all ears.

Baggers

if you're using 8x8 tiles, have you looked at Ai-Generic? or FemtoColor? on the LCD, I don't have one, so can't really say what driver would work or not.

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awesomeduck

Can you point me to these? I looked for Ai-Generic in the object exchange, and found nothing. I have never even heard of this.

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

We couldn't get everyone to agree (hippy is hard to contact) to allow it to be licensed as MIT.
So it isn't in the OBEX..

Here's the thread with AiGeneric. It isn't sprites, but it has easily character redefinition
for the next best thing.

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=704974

Loadrunner, Spydriver, and Mythic Flight all used this driver for gaming so theres some examples
of how to work around it without sprites.

OBC

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Baggers

Thanks OBC, knew you'd beat me to it lol [noparse]:D[/noparse]

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awesomeduck

I have decided to focus on the Hydra specific code, since that's what I have the best documentation on, in the form of the Hydra book. I have hooked up my Hydra to the Parallax 3.5"LCD and am using the HEL_GFX_ENGINE_040.SPIN driver. It is ok, but not great. In the upper left hand corner of the screen there is some flickering. Randomly throughout the screen there are some pixels that get turned on ever so briefly.

I have been using the pacman demos as a starting point for my tests as I build maps and tiles.

I tried using the 040b and 050 versions of the HEL engine, but the display either did not sync or everything was black and white with "fuzz" all over it. The Hydra book specifically states that the engine is not intended to work with and on page 776 it even suggest that you can "make it more LCD compliant". What exactly is it that I need to be looking at changing to make things look better on the little LCD display???

Right now 040 is the only thing that seems to be working with the LCD. Any thoughts on how to improve?