Is it possible to make an elite clone on the Arduboy/has anything similar been done? If it were to be attempted it would obviously have to be a severe downgrade from the real game, as the arduboy only has about half of the processing power and memory of a commodore 64, but perhaps something similar can be accomplished. I do not have the programming skill to even attempt this yet, but I still think the idea is interesting.
EDIT: It has half the ram and flash memory but more processing power. My bad.
Arduboy has a lot more processing power (C64 with ~1 mhz vs arduboy with 8/16 mhz - the difference is more in reallity) but far less ram (c64 with 64 kb arduboy with 2,5 kb).
It’s even worse when considering that most common 6502 instructions are 3-6 cycles vs 1-2 cycles for the AVR and it takes about half the instructions for an AVR to do the same work thanks to the number of registers. And the AVR has a hardware multiplier in 2 cycles.
So on top of a 16x clock rate there’s about 6x work done for the same clock (even more when lots of multiplications are involved).
You’d need a C64 running at about 100Mhz to keep up when it comes to pure math
Speed isn’t a concern. It’s PROGMEM that’s the issue. the 6502 also has single byte instructions which reduce code size. AVR instructions are two bytes at least.
I think a downgraded version of Elite is doable in some way.
ARM, x86, AVR, 6502 et cetera all have very different performance characteristics,
even without taking vector operations into account.
That’s why I made sure to add ‘GPU’ to the list.
It did indeed have hardware sprite support.
If you’ve never done any programming before then it’s going to be quite a while before you can manage an elite-like (unless you’re particularly good at 3D geometry and maths).
By the way, you can reply to multiple people at once,
either by using @name (e.g. @alt_f) to ‘mention’ them,
or by highlighting which part of a post you’re replying to and pressing the ‘Quote’ button the appears,
which will insert a quote block into your reply, like the one I just did of your post.
Ah okay thank you, I didn’t realize I could @ people! Also, I understand that it will be a while before I can even attempt it, but hopefully I’ll have enough practice before fall to start to put together a proof of concept or something. I figure it’s probably a good idea to have a long term goal set anyway, something to work up to.
If you have no prior experience,
start with some very simple games like noughts & crosses.
For an Elite-like the bigger challenge is actually the 3D geometry and rendering,
and being able to optimise it adequately.
At a minimum you’d need to know about vectors, matrices, affine transformations, the process of mapping coordinate spaces (e.g. converting world coordinates to camera coordinates with a projection matrix) and culling (i.e. not rendering what you can’t see).
Don’t get me wrong, an Elite-like is possible,
but it’s say it’s quite a difficult project if you’ve never done any 3D rendering before.
(Even more difficult if you’ve never done any programming before.)
You’d need a fair bit of knowledge to be able to pull it off.
