Presenting bitbox at "le capitole du libre" in Toulouse

I was kindly invited to present the bitbox as part of the "Capitole du libre" meeting, where I presented the hardware and software conception during a nealy one hour talk with many interesting questions after. The project has found a few very welcome new enthusiasts !

It really was a pleasure to discuss with everyone there, working on free / opensource games, awesome operating systems or nice little games that beg to be implemented on the bitbox ...

That, and many interesting more general conferences about opensource or blender (yay). The slides are in french, but I plan to include them

The big problem is that it entails so many new ideas and directions that my sleep deprivation will not be much better for another year I guess ...

Simple modes

Some have expressed the interest for simple modes for the Bitbox. An recent commit is providing such mode , on top of the standard kernel.

The so-called simple modes are called like this because they provide a frame buffer interface, so the application programmer will only have to write bits and bytes to the video memory - much like it's done on PC. So the interface is a vram buch of memory and a color palette (because the tradeoff is a reduced palette or resolution)

There are two examples in the bitbox SDK (one of them below), but generally you'll need to define a simple makefile variable VGA_SIMPLE_MODE=X with the given mode and include the bitbox.mk standard makefile.

(Yes it's currently defined at compile time - if your program needs to switch between two modes at runtime, it might be time to switch to a standard kernel / engine - it's not difficult !)