Forum comments in chronological order

Anonymous
Fri 3-Apr-2009 08:14

I'm thinking how to change it in to a "graphic&sound card".
How to force it to display data from UART (or other interface).
Anyway, awsome work. I'm highly impressed.

I apologize for my English.

Anonymous
Sun 5-Apr-2009 01:51

Wonderful design and music ! I'm trying to reproduce it and to understand it, but for now I'm stuck on a few build problems.

Thierry C.

Anonymous
Wed 8-Apr-2009 11:23

This is sweet!

It kicks ass!

Anonymous
Wed 8-Apr-2009 19:53

hah... thats amazinggg.(: youre wayy smart *___*

Anonymous
Wed 8-Apr-2009 21:33

I think you did a great job, given the complexity of the piece - practice makes perfect! Just wanted to balance the negative comments on here. More!

Anonymous
Thu 9-Apr-2009 01:32

Hi

I have some questions. This is really one of the most amazing things i have seen, and since you have uploaded the source and schematics i wanted to build my own copy of your demo board to see if it actually works. (I REALLY want to see it with my own eyes and show it to my friends)

So,
I have an atmega168 lying around, which almost is identical to atmega88, but with more flash. My board is ready and built according to your ASCII description, but I can't make it work for some reason. Im quite new to microcontrollers and im not familiar enough with assembler to understand most of your code (I have tried for hours, really). Linux is my main OS and i have avr-gcc, avrdude, the build-essential metapackage and so on installed, so compiling your sources went without problems. The hex-file is uploaded and the fuses are set as you described. But as mentioned, it does not work.. there is no signal on any pin.

I think this is because the source is unchanged, and written for atmega88, so there are most likely some things that need to be changed in order to run it on atmega168, but i dont even know where to start. Usually i use eclipse with the avr plugin, so i dont really know how most things actually work. Here is a comparision between atmega48, 88 and 168: http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc2554.pdf

Would you pleeease help me getting started, i really want to make this work. I will upload my eagle schematics and board layout once im sure it works, together with the atmega168 hex file in case someone is interested.

Anonymous
Thu 9-Apr-2009 16:33

tl;dr

Anonymous
Sun 12-Apr-2009 21:51

Great Demo Linus!

A bunch of us were watching the Breakpoint TV feed, wishing we were there!

Anonymous
Mon 13-Apr-2009 13:47

it's going to take time :) As I really wonder how you did that, especially the video modes used with so few RAM, I tried to disassemble your eeprom using PropList but the result is... unreadable :)
And if you have mixed spin and pasm... going to be very tough...

by the way, give me a clue, tile mode ? 16x16, 4 colors per tile ?

Anonymous
Mon 13-Apr-2009 14:23

seek and ye shall find.... :)

Anonymous
Mon 13-Apr-2009 15:02

is it normal that the eeprom header is that strange ? the 1st long should give the Clk frequence and 00007C5C => 1551 MHz !?!? (instead of 8O MHz as you said it is demo board compatible : 00B4C404)
And the image checksum in not verified...

Did you upload the good image ??? Not sure I'd like to test it on my demo board...

Anonymous
Mon 13-Apr-2009 20:08

Great idea and great interpretation :)

Anonymous
Mon 13-Apr-2009 20:49

shocking.

Anonymous
Tue 14-Apr-2009 03:02

00007c5c is an assembly instruction.

Anonymous
Tue 14-Apr-2009 11:57

5C7C0000 =>
010111 0001 1111 000000000 000000000
RET ????
Return to which address ?

Why do the eeprom starts like that and not as a standard image ?

Anonymous
Tue 14-Apr-2009 12:58

This is bullshit.

A lot of the time you don't "read" code, you scan it. If you're looking for constructor calls or error messages (strings) then yes, only actually *reading* the green text is many times faster and less error-prone.

In normal text you don't skip every verb (or noun or whatever) but when briefly browsing code you *can* skip strings (green) and just look at the blue words (if,then,else,while,...) plus indentation to get the general flow of the function.

Anonymous
Wed 15-Apr-2009 06:48

Everything else in the first 16 bytes of the header is standard. The important stuff starts at 0x18 (as suggested in the header) where you see some interpreter bytecodes that are used to launch the program. To understand the rest, you'll have to dig it in the parallax propeller forum.

Anonymous
Mon 20-Apr-2009 08:28

amazing man , this is amazing !!! best tty article ever

Anonymous
Wed 22-Apr-2009 07:41

amazing work man, the sounds of your demo brought me back to my youth playing games on ancient hardware :D

Anonymous
Thu 23-Apr-2009 01:13

I will take this up.
Ill draw it in eagle

Anonymous
Thu 23-Apr-2009 03:16

Finished!
I replaced the pnp transistor with a P-Mosfet
I can Make the PCBS for these, but they will cost about $40-$60 a board fully assembled.
I used axle resistors and diodes in the schematic
Here is the schematic: http://dump.no/files/de4e5c2db4de/craft-sch.7z
In it is a High Contrast and Low Contrast Image of the Schematic, Also an Eagle CAD schematic file.
Eagle CAD is Freeware, many people use it: http://www.cadsoft.de/
Enjoy :3

Anonymous
Thu 23-Apr-2009 03:24

My guess is the registries for the timer interrupts are different on the 88 then the 168.
You should see some signals on the pins tough.
Read the atmeag168 manual and the atmega88 manual
Look at the registries on the chips
Compare them, to what he is setting in code, make changes...
here is my email: (godberg[at]gmail{Dot}com)
I am also the one who posted the eagle schematic...
I'll help you out.

Anonymous
Fri 24-Apr-2009 01:48

Trevlig låt. Jag gillar den! *digga* :D

Anonymous
Fri 24-Apr-2009 07:38

Haha! Skickligt monterat! Var hittar man den?

Anonymous
Tue 28-Apr-2009 01:09

Det blev en skillnad, så jag kan inte annat än att hålla med dig. Det blev ju mycket läsvänligare.

Anonymous
Thu 30-Apr-2009 22:45

hey!

very nice job! i love this game. levels are getting more and more tricky, but you never know if the next one is easy or not. :) is there any way to install the programm on a cell phone? how complex is the algorithm to generate the levels?