New Game : Mario Watch !

Hi ! It's been a long time since real content has been put on this blog.

Now is a good time to fix that, by announcing a new game on the bitbox  !

Being a kid while the game & watch lcd games were all the rage, I like to reimplement them.
This one is a nice one because it has mario ! Released in 1983, this little will be playable o the bitbox and the micro. A few missing features (sound & scores by example) for now, but the gameplay is starting to take shape !

stay tuned for next updates, you can still begin to play it now !

Game is hosted at : https://github.com/makapuf/bitbox-mariowatch

makapuf

Ideas of games to write

Some of us are looking for game ideas to code (just before they've way too many projects ongoing :) )

Of course, you can contribute to one of the WIP projects on the bitbox wiki page (https://github.com/makapuf/bitbox/wiki/Software-Index) - frankly, many of those games need attention and could use some polish.

But hat if you can to create a simple project in a weekend (of course it will run on the bitbox, where else ?), here are some ideas of simple games to try  !

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/blog/2014/12/12/games-in-2014/


Examples :

• bomberman
• snake  https://github.com/lowagner/bitbox-snake
• tron (which is a multiplayer snake)
• blackjack
• bejeweled
• connect four
• flood it
• katamari damaci (!)
• tetris
• memory
• grid lock
• missile command
• arkanoid
• scortched earth
• dr mario
• diner dash
• doodle jump(jumper :) https://github.com/makapuf/bitbox-jump )
• 2048 !
• ...

 
And here is someone who coded 50 games last year ! Can you do better ? (I don't :) )
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/blog/2014/12/12/games-in-2014/

Micromo : a Thomson MO5 emulator !

Hi all, I made a port of the dcmo5 emulator for the bitbox micro.

 

The MO5 was a famous (in France, completely unknown everywhere else) computer, not so bad after all, and on par with a Spectrum. 

Its specs : 

• 320x200 fixed palette 16-colors (16k RAM) with 2 colors by row of 8 pixels
• CPU : a motorola 6809E @ 1MHz
• 48kB of RAM / 16kB of ROM

This first version can run Basic, load programs from cassette (embedded on the binary), use a keyboard. It can play some games and runs on Bitbox (should run on micro also). It's a first release, missing selecting cassettes from the (existing) menu, gamepad support or sound.

The repo is here : https://github.com/makapuf/bitbox-micromo

Thanks a lot to Pulkomandy who is a real MO5 programmer - lots of cool stuff about those micros and democoding on these old clunkers on his site: http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/thomson/wiki

shinra demo

my (much better) demo.

Answer to preceding post ... ByteBeat

As you may have tried yourself, the tiny binaries produced by the preceding code create long tunes directly coded by a function of time !

So you basically have s=f(t) where s is the output sample, t the sample id and f a simple expression as the one I put on the title.

The thing is you can actually build quite complex song with it ! 

This technique has been called bytebeat and the main article describing it was made by someone named "viznut".

See the original article here http://countercomplex.blogspot.fr/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies-from-one-line-of.html or here http://canonical.org/~kragen/bytebeat/

u=t*((t>>13)&31&t>>9)-((t>>7)&23&t>>3)

What is this ?? Well it's a very interesting thing I found on the web the other day.

If you have a bitbox please download and run this small (3.1kB) program - it needs sound, not display. (I'll provide the code  - which is really not much more than what is in the title .. and some background info soon).

Controls : plug in sound output, also try to press the bitbox button. I really like the 8th one ..

(edit) for those with a linux computer, here is a sdl backend compilation of the same code ... ans a big hint

new game : Dragon's Lair !

Ah .. such a nice game to play on the Bitbox ! (see Angry Video Game Nerd or Joueur du Grenier reviews ;) ... )

The game is open source and the release is here : https://github.com/makapuf/bitbox-fmv

For more info about the game see : http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/games/pages/dl.asp
for Bitbox itself see main repo / wiki : https://github.com/makapuf/bitbox/



 


This game / engine is aimed at reproducing the dragons lair game on the Bitbox. It's only compatible with the standard bitbox since the data is streamed from SD card.

Back from FOSDEM

I got back from the FOSDEM a week and but didn't have the time to write about : here are some small notes about it.