Video uploading the cart:
Nice.
Reset button FTW
Couldn’t help but noticing that the RGB LED blinks green instead of red did you get a different type of RGB LED or is it wired differently?
I think we talked about this before, same thing happened on the other FX dev kit, I think my LED is either backwards or just different. I don’t know they are always a problem for me.
You should include the Arduboy2 library’s RGBled example sketch on the flash chip for testing.
I can’t remember the name of the app but @crait has something that tests everything really nice about your Arduboy. Too many games for Arduboy… FX will be a revolution! There will be a “Apps & Tools” category.
For a list of the games check out here: The order of the games and the categories will be updated, if you don’t see your game message @mameise if you do see your game and you’d rather not let me know!
I’m excited for this! I think I will end up trying far more games with them all on one device. Easy game swapping was the one feature I really missed on the Arduboy.
I guess an SD card was never really an option considering how slim the Arduboy is (plus the prohibitive costs of creating a new injection molded case?), but this has almost all the benefits without the risk of losing/breaking an SD card.
Is there any information on how loading games onto the mod chip works? I’ve ordered one and it’s a while until it arrives, but if a description already exists I would be interested to read it.
Also, would it be possible for a game to load data from the FX mod chip outside of its own standard allocation?
This is the method now for loading new games on the external flash:
We are hoping to eventually make it even easier with a drag and drop interface to select your games, but for now you prepare a CSV file and a python script creates the .bin file that is transfered to the external flash.
Games can load data from the external flash too and was hoping to seed some development of that with project falcon but nothing took hold.
I did some live streams and unfortunately the videos are gone, but you can use the example sketches by @Mr.Blinky to make it happen. I was able to pull over 100 8x8 images from flash memory and draw them overlapping EACH FRAME with still good FPS. So each sprite can even be a movie if you were to adjust the memory address each frame.
There is a potential to create a game that actually uses all of the 16MB of data for game content, in fact I really hope someone does one of these days. You could have a full story RPG with tons of items, music, and even cutscenes.
The flash memory can be written to within the application as well, so storing massive amounts of user data (user maps) is also possible.
Its not super easy as writing arduino code because you have to address all of your memory instead of just letting the compiler do it, but the functions that exist now take a lot of the heavy lifting out of the way.
I ripped two streams. Together 5.5GB want me to upload them somewhere?
That is a lot of bytes I don’t know what to do with that many, do you have a drop box? That’s too big for google isnt’ it?
don’t know if my dropbox still exists. But I have some space on Google. Will upload them there.
That’s pretty awesome, but I am guessing that also means there will be a wild west of data access with different games all trying to read and write to the same addresses if these features are utilised?
I guess that could be fixed if there was an FX “application” that was actually just a chunk of memory that contained which sectors belong to which program, with a standard library used to access this data that handles the lookup and provides a pointer etc. But that idea would need to be universally accepted to work, which is a pretty big flaw
No thankfully this is better managed than EEPROM. Within each CSV is a list of memory start and length.
You supply the hex file and the bin file.
The tool then allocates the memory space, and then goes back and patches the hex to the adddress space that it defined.
So as you develop you don’t actually hard code in your memory addresses, you pass them on to the library. The library then compiles with a placeholder memory address and is later patched by the tool so it plays nice with other games.
So actually, as long as nobody goes off the rails and uses their own bare metal implementation, each FX game should play nice with the other.
Good reminder for my pre-order lol
“We might actually sell out of pre-mades soon!”
In fact I’m almost sure of it, I’m going to count tomorrow and might be sold out then!
Maybe it would be a good idea to let the people from the original Kickstarter campaign know about the Arduboy FX release via an update? Some might have somehow missed the big news…