Two designs to help with PGM research. A flash cart using modified PicoROM firmware and a passthrough board that allows me to trace cartridge signals easily. 7 days from idea to on my workbench thanks to @jlcpcb.bsky.social and @kicad.org
3D printers are such an amazing tool for making tools. It’s not a complex thing, but I needed a way to support these stacked PCBs in a way that allowed me to work on them both. Took some rough measurements. 15 minutes in Fusion 360. Two hours to print. Problem solved.
I have some PicoROMs back in stock. New 28-pin version and a revised 32-pin version. www.tindie.com/products/pbr...
I'm too scared to watch it. I remember it been amazing and I can still sing the song, but I really can't believe it holds up.
I saw this project at VCF Socal yesterday and it amazed me. It's such a testament to individual effort and creativity. I don't know what I'll do with it, but I backed it on crowd supply and I'll be happy to have it in my collection.
You are a subject of the King now, fyi.
Who Did What At Irem: A (Semi-)Comprehensive Thread
Today, we're going to be doing a deepdive on one of the premier arcade giants of the 1980's. We're all familiar with enduring classics such as R-Type and In The Hunt, but who were the talented men & women that created them?
Japan-Only TAITO Quiz Games Just Hit the #MiSTerFPGA F2 Core! Thanks @wickerwaka.com
Read more here: metalgamesolid.com/fpga/mister-...
The value they chose for the shadow scaling, 65, was almost certainly picked to create this effect. It reduces the sprites to a quarter of the size. 64 would be a more obvious and correct value and would not have created this shimmering effect.
If the counter doesn't increment by some multiple of 256 over the entire frame, then each frame will start with a different counter value and you'll get slightly different rows selected on scaled sprites. Games tend to pick scaling values that avoid this, PuLiRuLa exploits it!
Each sprite starts with whatever the counter value is at the end of the previous sprite and each FRAME starts with whatever the previous frame ended with. It just never resets and I can't find any mechanism that causes it to reset.
I had assumed that these counters get reset for each new sprite. In the previous example the 8 rows of the 16 row sprite that get draw will be different if the counter starts at a number >= 128, because the counter will overflow at different times. But it NEVER resets.
Unscaled sprites increment by 256 every time, so it overflows for each input row and every row gets draw. If you want to half the size of a sprite you set the increment to 128, then it only overflows every second row and half the rows get drawn.
Each 16x16 sprite on the F2 can be scaled all the way down to 1x1. For vertical scaling this is down with an 8-bit counter. Each sprite specifies a zoom value and for each of the 16 rows the counter gets incremented by that value. When the counter overflows it draws a row.
When I saw video from an arcade PCB I guessed that the shimmer was something do with what I called "spooky" sprites which is something I encountered when I made some tests for sprite positioning and scaling. I ignored it at the time because I hadn't seen any games use it.
The latest version of the Taito F2 core fixes the shadows in PuLiRuLa so they "shimmer" like you see in the video. The shadows are just the character sprites drawn with a black color palette and scaled down vertically. So what makes them shimmer?
putting the call out to #chiptune bsky
I need your tips on who is actively pushing chiptune forward right now
particularly interested in newer / emerging artists, as well as women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC artists
please repost for reach ❤️🙏
My home town has a wind farm and I think they are awesome. There is even a bunch of hiking trails through them and you can get right up the the turbines. Lots of locals are opposed to them though, not sure what their reasons are.
NeoGeo is a 27c1024 which is a 1MBit, 16-bit ROM. RP2350B would have enough pins to do it. There have been times when I wish I support ROMs like that, but I haven't been motivated enough to design the board.
I've sold out of PicoROMs. I made 150 and sold 130. I'm surprised I managed to sell so many because I think it's pretty niche. I've no idea what people are using them for, so if you bought some and you are using them, please let me know!
A software-defined ROM replacement solution for Commodore computers, Uses a $2 STM32F4 microcontroller github.com/piersfinlays... #commodore #c64 #vic20 #retrocomputing
It's a Kojima game, so I'm assuming that the less you know, the less confusing it will be.
Can I play Death Stranding 2 if I haven't played the first game?
Amazing project and amazing work. Congrats!
Ibuprofen, ice, Diclofenac sodium cream.
The end result was pretty easy to replicate in the core. Of course I haven't found a single game that actually uses this functionality. Maybe something will come up, but even if it doesn't it's nice to uncover more secrets.
With that I could analyze the results and work out what each flag does. The hardest part was finding the right variety of colors and shapes to make the different interactions obvious. I thought simple shapes and primary colors with be most useful, but they ended up hiding a lot of stuff.
The TC0360PRI is used in the Taito F2 and several other boards. I prioritizes/mixes up to 3 12-bit color inputs. It has a few different "blend" modes for combining the inputs and some flags for those modes. I built a little test screen so I could test all the different parameters on real hardware.
At Mrs. Winston's salad bar, near the Santa Monica airport, a friend handed me the bacon bits after they were done with them and I then offered it to the person behind me in line, which they declined. That person? Harrison Ford, Hollywood actor.
