I wish I had heard about the META before I bought the Arduboy. I never could understand why they made a handheld that would’ve been completely subpar even 30 years ago, inferior in almost every way to the original GameBoy, but I figured I’d try it out since there was a little community going.
I kept wondering why it had less RAM and sprites and sound channels than the Atari 5200 from 1982, and couldn’t even play games as well as systems from 40 years ago, when playing games is what it’s supposed to do.
But I got one, because I was impressed by games like MicroCity, Curse of Astarok, Catacombs of the Damned. But then, it’s easier to be impressed when the bar is set so low.
People say it has to be small and cheap, but now they’re selling full-color arcade versions for $20. So…why?
Anyway now that I know about the gamebuino meta, imagine how much more impressive those same games would be with music, and color, and 8 times the flash, and 10 times the RAM. And Start and Select buttons. They say it even has an SD card slot, so you won’t have to mock yourself by constantly loading games from a computer or android device, the presence of which reminds you that you already have another device plugged into your Arduboy that does everything the Arduboy does but better.
But I hardly see anything on Youtube showing gamebuino meta games, so there doesn’t seem to be much of a community, so I probably won’t get that either.
Sorry for being so negative, but I really don’t understand the Arduboy. I got excited to try making a game for it, but then I figured I’d have to learn the assembly to get the most out of it. And then still cut out most of the things I wanted to do, because of technical limitations in the year 2020 that weren’t even a problem in 1989.
Maybe I’ll try anyway. For a game like Ardynia here, or any adventure or anything with a storyline, I was thinking when you run out of room for more dungeons, more enemies, etc, you could just make another game as Chapter 2 that continues the story. Once you have the engine and the assets, it would be relatively easy to release a new chapter every month with different maps and a different end boss.
Of course a true continue into Chapter 2 would mean you’d have to somehow upload your Chapter 1 save from the arduboy and then put it into the Chapter 2 gamefile before downloading it. But maybe instead I could use continue codes like NES games used to have.