Hackvision Asteroids running on XP (video)

[jonathanjones]

Developing and debugging an Arduino program is quite slow: find mistakes from serial out, fix, recompile and upload.

I wanted to create a bit easier tool for my own development, so I ported the TVout and Controllers libraries to SFML.

Now, with a bit of typedefs and wrappers, Asteroids is running on my IBM T42 O0

Whats the advantage ? Well, for one I can step debug my Arduino game. Also, I can see the program immediately, no need to upload to Arduino.

Sound and EEPROM support is not ready, and I don’t know if I’ll add it at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M50fYQxHi4c

This forum seems to be sleeping. So I’ll wait and see if this creates any interest before I decide whether I’ll bother to clean up the code and publish it.

• This topic was modified 8 years ago by Michael.

[Michael]

Wow, that’s great! I don’t know anything about programming on Windows (an old Unix guy), but that’s fantastic. I’m wondering how you got the timing to be accurate?

[jonathanjones]

Hey, thanks for the comment.
SFML = simple and fast media library and is also available for Linux & Mac & iOs & Android. You do not need to know anything about the OS. This was the first time I ever used this toolchain.

About timing:
I bypassed the TVout timing because it relied on PAL/NTSC timing. SFML provides a similar frame-based timing. Mind you, its still running a bit too fast. Making sounds is going to be way more difficult: that would require multitasking and a dedicated thread for sound.

However, 1:1 emulation is not my goal. This tool is already proving valuable. I am working on a pseudo-3d game for Hackvision, and boy is it so much easier to catch errors when you can set breakpoints and watch variables.

My code is extremely quick & dirty and I am always ashamed to show it because I have no clue about proper C or C++. But if you want, Michael, I can send you this source. You should be able to install SFML easily on Linux. I don’t want to publish a lib just yet.

[Michael]

Well, it’s super cool anyway and it sounds like you have a good development platform for your game. Let us know when you have a game to show — anything is worthy of sharing. This is a very small community 🙂

[BrianDeall]

My “testing team” has taken a look at this and they like it. I think it’s cool. It seems like Poofy can jump pretty high, but maybe he could jump a little farther horizontally. I think your collision detection is fine — bounding box is simple.
Game play seems good — great game! You are pushing the limits of what can be done on such a small MCU.

[Author]

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