[overclocked]

Yea, I second that! Nice to see another version of my try in Mario16 that didn't quite make it to goal..
I'll wait for the ROM. Please tykel?

 

[tykel]

Attaching the latest build. Needs scrolling draw optimization, but it's still rather smooth.

Low-FPS GIF:

EDIT: Forgot to mention controls. D-pad for movement, A to jump, Start resets the game.

 

[refraction]

Yeah that scrolling runs really smooth on my emu Looks great too!!

There's only 2 criticisms I would make at this point

1. The jumping feels far too quick, going up and down, would be good if you could slow that down a bit, by about 1/3 should probably do it Most good platformers have you jumping roughly the same speed that you run.
2. The running animation could probably do with 1 more intermediate frame, would probably make it look a bunch better!

Aside from that, it plays great Just need stuff to do now!

 

[overclocked]

Great work tykel! Have you used/looked at any of the code from my Mario16? If not, we should join them into a Scrolling/layer/collision detection Lib to get some more Chip16 games in the future! I have problems restarting the game when using Reset in my nChip16 emulator. Not sure if this is feature of the game or my emulator that needs fixing!

Attaching the latest build. Needs scrolling draw optimization, but it's still rather smooth.

Low-FPS GIF:

EDIT: Forgot to mention controls. D-pad for movement, A to jump, Start resets the game.

 

[tykel]

Yeah that scrolling runs really smooth on my emu Looks great too!!

There's only 2 criticisms I would make at this point

1. The jumping feels far too quick, going up and down, would be good if you could slow that down a bit, by about 1/3 should probably do it Most good platformers have you jumping roughly the same speed that you run.
2. The running animation could probably do with 1 more intermediate frame, would probably make it look a bunch better!

Aside from that, it plays great Just need stuff to do now!

Thanks ref. Will take into consideration once more is implemented!

Great work tykel! Have you used/looked at any of the code from my Mario16? If not, we should join them into a Scrolling/layer/collision detection Lib to get some more Chip16 games in the future! I have problems restarting the game when using Reset in my nChip16 emulator. Not sure if this is feature of the game or my emulator that needs fixing!

Thank you. I started this from scratch, although once I posted it here I went back and remembered Mario16. I fired it up for old time's sake, and with some gravity implemented there's a solid base there!
I'm sure there are grounds for code re-use between them.

Meanwhile, I have implemented an audio queue, to drive music playback and easily queue multi-tone sound effects (so I have a little Mario-like jingle when I collect coins). I have also added objects, like coins, which can have collision- and timer-based handlers. Also more GUI, like a countdown timer, coin count, lives, etc.

EDIT: I am hovering around 10000-11000 cycles/frame right now, out of the 16666 available for 60 FPS. So I still have decent leeway to add more features.

 

[paul_nicholls]

Awesome work mate!!

 

[refraction]

EDIT: I am hovering around 10000-11000 cycles/frame right now, out of the 16666 available for 60 FPS. So I still have decent leeway to add more features.

Yeah still a bit of room there xD Not a massive amount though! You wanna leave some headroom incase you have a really busy scene, the cycle count could easily rack up. Try running it with a room full of blocks or something, see what your cycle count sits at then

 

[psymps]

Hi Guys.

I'm new to this forum and I just stumbled across this thread. I was wondering what the current status of CHIP16 is? I am working my way through writing an emulator for the CHIP16 system which targets the version 1.3 specification.

I was also wondering if you have any hints or things to look out for whilst implementing the emulator. I have written a CHIP8 emulator before but that was with a lot of guidance from tutorials and explanatory documents. I want to try and figure this one out a lot more by myself.

 

[overclocked]

psymps, just do it! I've written an emulator in C#, nChip16.
https://github.com/mwedmark/nChip16

It was good practice ans I got some help here in the group. Current (paused) Chip16-project is a Chip8 emulator running on Chip16. just to take it another level.

My take on helping community was to start writing a reference conformance self-test in Chip16 assembler, but sadly only the new opcodes for 1.3 is added there:
https://github.com/mwedmark/nChip16/blob/master/Chip16Programs/Chip1613ST/Chip1613ST.asm
Feel free to add test for more opcodes there. But because this project uses Graphics in form of a command-line output it is not possible to use this initially, because most stuff must be working or the actual support code for test will fail instead of the actual test.

Good luck!

 

[refraction]

As overclocked said, just do it If you get stuck, feel free to ask a question, I'm sure somebody will be able to answer it! There's also a bunch of sourcecode available for existing emulators like overclocked's and mine (linked in my sig)

 

[refraction]

I just noticed Shendo's Sokoban game was missing from the games pack (also added the PC BIOS demo), so I've made an updated version of the pack with as much as I can remember to find here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WYNtCEvovT_KAAolOsloKmQRdcAR9vXW

Tykel: If you could come back from the dead and attach it to the first post, replacing the old link which doesn't work anymore, that would be great xD

 

[psymps]

Thanks for the comments.

I have just implemented a working prototype after hacking away at it for a few days. I can get the test ROMs to work (BC_TestRom.c16 and Chip1613ST.c16), but when I try to run "Mandel", nothing is displayed on the screen! After stepping through my code with a "fine-tooth comb", I'm struggling to see where the issue is. Thoughts?

 

[refraction]

Do all the other available roms display graphics? or is it just Mandel that isn't working?
Have you tried logging your emulator to see if it does anything weird?

 

[psymps]

Do all the other available roms display graphics? or is it just Mandel that isn't working?
Have you tried logging your emulator to see if it does anything weird?

The ROMs I have tried so far all display graphics and work as expected. Even the other Mandelbrot ROMs appear to work fine! I have also logged my emulator and can't seem to find anything abnormal, although I am going to check my file loading routine again along with CPU initialisation etc.

 

[refraction]

Hmm, can you do custom palettes in your emulator? I believe one of the Mandelbrot roms uses a custom palette, so it could be just displaying the colours wrong.

 

[psymps]

Hmm, can you do custom palettes in your emulator? I believe one of the Mandelbrot roms uses a custom palette, so it could be just displaying the colours wrong.

Yes, I can correctly display custom palettes. I used the Palette Flip ROM to verify this.

The issue only occurs with "Mandel.c16", where nothing at all is displayed.

 

[psymps]

There probably is an opcode that is implemented incorrectly that I just can't decipher yet. I'm going to spend the next few days fully analyzing my emulator logs again to see what is going on

 

[refraction]

Yeah good plan, I'm not sure what's causing it by your description I'm afraid

 

[psymps]

Yeah good plan, I'm not sure what's causing it by your description I'm afraid

My emulator is calling the 0xC4 opcode (which is PUSHF) whilst running this ROM. Is this the behaviour you also observe when running Mandel.c16?

 

[refraction]

I'll have to look later tonight. I'm guessing it doesn't pop it again?