TVout Drawing

Hi,

I use the “bitmap” functionality a lot, since it is a little easier (for me) to think that way.

There is some information about the bitmap functions here:
http://code.google.com/p/arduino-tvout/wiki/Bitmaps

Image2Code is one of the applications you can use to create bitmap graphics. You can find it posted here:
https://forum.crystalfontz.com/showthread.php?5854-Image2Code-bitmap-to-source-code-converter

I ended up having to code my own utilities to do the same sort of things. I attached an application that can convert bitmap images into the same sort of format. You may/may not find it useful, depending on what you want to accomplish. It is a simple command-line utility. If you look at the included .bat file you can see how to specify the input image size (default is 8×8).

Hopefully at least some of that helps.
–trodoss

Here are a few numbers that might help give you a little better idea of how much space is there (and what might be needed)

Elventure – 18,716 bytes (out of 32,256 bytes)

Poofy Adventure – 18,466 bytes (out of 32,256 bytes)

Either of those games are around 18-19Kb in size, so not terribly huge. There would be lots of “room” to expand them.

#include 

#include 

#include 



#define TVwidth 128

#define TVheight 96



TVout TV;



void setup()

{

TV.begin(_NTSC, TVwidth, TVheight);

TV.select_font(font4x6);

TV.delay_frame(60);

}



void loop()

{



}

Just a “basic” sketch that uses TVOut and includes a font takes up about 5,096 bytes.
Without an included font, the same TVOout sketch takes up about 4,054 bytes.

So, to use TVOut there is some overhead (about 4.5-5 Kb), however that is not terrible. The 10Kb size you have right now doesn’t seem to be really out of line for a TVOut-based sketch.

Provided that graphics are stored in code (and not in memory) you have a lot of “space” for graphics/logic. Depending on how you code your programs, you should also have room for logic. Compiled code from the AVR-GCC is relatively compact, so if you expect your game logic to be around 10Kb, then you should have enough space to work with.

Any “game data” that you plan on storing (like maps, text, etc.) you end up having to come up with a storage strategy that “fits” what you are doing. If you know you are going to use a lot of text, breaking it up into re-usable words/fragments is important. If it is just “SCORE” and “GAME OVER”, that likely isn’t necessary 😉 However, if you are making say a text-based adventure (a “Zork”-like game), you are going to want to “pack” text as tightly as possible (tokenizing, or LZW-like compression). There are similar strategies for vector-based graphics or bitmap-based graphics. It is all a matter of finding what “fits” for your particular project.

So, is 32Kb “enough” space? It is for some things, but certainly not everything. For arcade-style (classic 80’s) games it should work fairly well, and with a little planning you can make all sorts of games.

Hopefully that gives you a little more explanation.
–trodoss