I had an awesome idea that I wanted to try some new systems this august. Its a month that I have off work so I thought if any month was going to work, it would be this one.
Unfortunately other stuff has come up, and now I'm half way into the month, I'm only just getting to the point of having a go at what I hoped would be a month full of exciting learning new chips and opcodes and struggling to get something working. I considered streaming it again and uploading to YouTube, both dead websites for me where I haven't done anything with either in ages.
It hasn't happened, but I have managed to get some stuff on the go, although most of it is admittedly from before. I still want to show some of it off though to show that I have done something.
Billiards for the Channel F is still giving me trouble, I have the hit ball working perfectly now, but now the player ball doesn't move at all after collision, this compared before to having hard coded responses for some of the basic directions. I had hoped to save hundreds of lines of code by generalising it, but I seem to be in a situation now where I've not quite gone forward. Its a headbanger for sure.
One of the things I've tried recently is to compile something for the Microvision. This is the 1979 handheld which was the first true handheld with rom cartridge capability. The number of homebrew on it is small, and for good reason - its quite delicate as hardware, does not have a good nostalgia point like the gameboy does, but also there simply isn't any other way of playing it either than on original hardware (with complicated ways of making a rom cart for it) and obscure emulation. I have only got a display working so far, nothing that is alterable - I'm not too sure how much I'll push into this yet as its a bit more complex.
One thing I haven't shown off too much yet is my GX4000 work, I'm having some niggles with some basics, but in theory I have got a working design in place. Its the most advanced thing I've been working on in Assembly, and I haven't taken advantage of that just yet. Its coming along, but slowly.
Finally, I've taken a whack at the Odyssey 2 better known as the Videopac in Europe. I've taken advantage of some tutorials online to get a square on the screen, the next step would be to try and get some gameplay in it. This might be my next proper attempt at games as there is a community around the system and still have a lot of homebrew games developed and released in physical form for it.
Not assembly related, but I have also been having a go at some of my old BYOND projects, I work on this occasionally when I'm in the mood.
One of the things that I'm trying to do while doing this work is document how to actually assemble and run programs. I'm probably not ever going to be a good authority on how to code in assembly, but actually getting something from a .asm to a usable rom file is poorly documented in some systems. For some enthusiasts it is probably easy as pie to understand how to do these things, I'm pretty much pure programmer with some basic understanding of how the hardware actually works, once we go into electrical pulses etc I'm gone, that part of documentation goes straight over my head.
Some of these websites helping with assembly tutorials have already gone down in obscurity, so the need to preserve what we can is becoming more apparent so that people like me can still have access to this information and build things with it.