New tile/sprite driver!
Ahle2
Posts: 1,179
I have too many projects going on at the same time!:blank:
At the moment none of them seems to ever get finished.
So I thought that if I showcase them half-finished, and if enough people shows some interest, it might get me motivated to finish them.
First out, a full color sprite/tile driver running in two cogs.
Features:
- 8bpp
- Horizontal/vertical pixel perfect scrolling
- Horizontal/vertical mirroring
- Registers can be updated per scanline to achieve parallax scrolling and other effects (like in this demo)
- 8 sprites per scanline (8 pixel wide) - Like a NES
Lacks:
- Sprites are only 20% implemented at the moment
Notes:
- Sprites per scanline can be drastically increased with more cogs!!
- This demo doesn't use any sprites!!
- This demo doesn't use more than 4 colors per 8x8 tile (gfx ripped from a limited system)
Instructions:
Upload the binary to your "demo board compatible" propeller board and enjoy.
/Ahle2
At the moment none of them seems to ever get finished.
So I thought that if I showcase them half-finished, and if enough people shows some interest, it might get me motivated to finish them.
First out, a full color sprite/tile driver running in two cogs.
Features:
- 8bpp
- Horizontal/vertical pixel perfect scrolling
- Horizontal/vertical mirroring
- Registers can be updated per scanline to achieve parallax scrolling and other effects (like in this demo)
- 8 sprites per scanline (8 pixel wide) - Like a NES
Lacks:
- Sprites are only 20% implemented at the moment
Notes:
- Sprites per scanline can be drastically increased with more cogs!!
- This demo doesn't use any sprites!!
- This demo doesn't use more than 4 colors per 8x8 tile (gfx ripped from a limited system)
Instructions:
Upload the binary to your "demo board compatible" propeller board and enjoy.
/Ahle2
Comments
Would love to see some of the other features demoed if you have the time, specifically more colors.
Cheers,
Jesse
NTSC 60Hz but the picture was decidedly 'shaky', it's usually rock steady on my TV.
I tried this on two demoboards just to make sure.
All the same it looks pretty cool!
Regards,
Coley
here the rightmost column of chars is flickering wildly (dunno if it's supposed to be overscan area, out of screen).
But other than that the picture is stable and looking good!
Keep on the good work
Alessandro
Keep up the great work!
--trodoss
The flickery char column at the right is a known issue and should be possible to fix without too much effort.
It will however be hard to get the sprites working correctly due to some special trickery in this driver.
I just wanted to see if there was any interest in this and to get some motivation.
It will take some time before I can continue working on it though.
@Coley
What exactly do yo mean by 'shaky'?
/Ahle2
I sent you a PM with some video.
Regards,
Coley
Than again ... Great job as usual
Now, let's see some more!... I want to play Mario on the prop !!!
Everything aside, good work. Really smart
Alex
I may even consider building a tiny *cheap* board with i2c/serial ram on it for the demo board so that everyone gets a chance to experience some coolness (pm me if you need any hardware designed/manufactured).
Okey, it's hard to debug that when my TV doesn't produce the same results as shown in your video.
@Alexis64
Thanks!
What do you mean by "building a tiny *cheap* board with i2c/serial ram on it for the demo board so that everyone gets a chance to experience some coolness" ??
/Ahle2
As for the right edge, are you using 32 chars, with the scroll, you can either only display one less char ( like the NES and Game Gear and Master System used to do ) is 31 instead of 32 chars, and have border earlier, or you can increase your scan line buffer, and draw 33 chars,
What's the problem with sprites? do you want a hand with them? if so let me know!
Yes, I'm using 32 chars, but it's kind of tricky to fix the flicker (for the same reason as why sprites are hard to implement).
List of reason why it's hard to do sprites:
- Because of a lot of trickery and optimizations
- I'm using front porch/back porch "tricks" for the horizontal sub 4 pixel scrolling
- The video output cog buffers each scanline, and then performs sprite blitting on it outside of the active scanline
- The rendering cog has to prepare sprite data (mask and pixel) which the video output cog blits to the buffered scanline
/Ahle2
For the flicker, can't you do the same trick at the end of the scanline? for getting the last few pixels of the display?
For the sprites, you just add the offset for the specific line your on
if you want a hand let me know
YouTube REALLY doesn't make justice to how smooth this really is. This demo is best viewed with a Propeller directly connected to a crt TV.
I see the flickering on the right edge is gone. Are you going to post a new binary to try out?
Next release will hopefully be a fully fledged version in source format.
(It may even be a combined release with Retronitus and some applications for doing music, maps, tiles and sprites)
Glad to see this project still moving forward. Looking forward to your release.
OBC
I wonder whether Parallax could sell a cheap video capture device, to help promote the getting of videos like this onto the web.
If anyone wants to make captures of their "propeller video stuff", I can help.
Just FYI, there are SD captures, and they look fairly good. HD capture devices are significantly better. Both offer S-video. I've got both.
If you don't care about the finer screen details, the SD ones are as little as $10. That's exactly what I paid for mine. "EZ-CAPTURE". ADS Tech sells HD devices that run $50 - $80. The image capture and included software are much better.
***Nice scroll!
Has the code been released?