so @TomF talked me into making it so blending colors on the #Mega68k console is true blending rather than resolving back to one of the 64 palette colors (so that the output is always 64 color)
i made a utility that takes an image and converts it into a tile layer with only 16 base colors with the framebuffer overlaid using all 64 colors with alpha blending and i can't help but wonder if this isn't too powerful
i understand a lot of this tech because of my work on my #mega68k fantasy console (which is basically an emulator for a system that didn't exist) and my experiments with programming language development. the principles involved aren't that complex, but getting all the myriad little details right as well as rolling it all up into a nice easy to use package ready for distribution requires a ton of dedication and is a seriously impressive achievement
Someone should make a new 16-bit console and put a big marketing push behind it. We keep seeing many new games being made today for our beloved 8-bit and 16-bit systems including #Amiga#NES#ZXSpectrum#GameBoy and other fan favorites, but the hardware is dying and it’s not easily obtainable, so games are being made out of pure passion and nothing more.
I wonder if such an idea has any chance of success… I would love a new 16-bit handheld in GameBoy format.
@darth The #Mega68k is just that. No current plans to make a real physical device (because we are two people and it's a hobby), but it's designed so you absolutely could. Would have sold for around the same price as a Genesis/MegaDrive in 1990.
Ugh. Slept badly, woke up late today, half the day's gone, did some boring shares & paperwork, cooked dinner, and finally managed to be Productive and do An Update. Victory!
I mean it's "productive" in quotes because it's some nerd-ass 1990s fantasy console, but... shut up it totally counts. Let me have this.
all sales at this point are basically funneled straight into #KitsuneTails development so by buying my other games you're directly supporting kitsune tails too
Spent some time talking to @TomF about the two chips he designed for the #Mega68k fantasy console, the blizzer and bronze (which I believe are a lot like the Amiga's blitter and copper)
I gotta say, with those two chips able to parallelize drawing to the special framebuffer layer the system has, a LOT of cool stuff is possible that would be extremely hard on traditional 16 bit consoles. Think isometric perspective games or 3D like DOOM or maybe even stuff like Star Fox
And the best part is the framebuffer is treated as a third plane by the VPU which composits everything together so you can get even more power out of all of this by cleverly combining the framebuffer with tile layers and sprites
Loads of potential and possibilities if you dig deep enough, very exciting
hrm. 3:2 isometric isn't terrible? 🤔 it's a little lopsided but that might not be so bad, kinda breaks up those super straight angles you get on 2:1 dimetric iso
@eniko been following #Mega68k , adding #KitsuneTails to the list.
Just getting into that feature. I was afraid I'd get dupe posts, but it seems clean so far...
Random #Mega68k trivia: while the console has a framebuffer, it is much more flexible than a framebuffer on something like MS-DOS. It can scroll by single pixels horizontally and vertically and has registers you can set to make it repeat on both axes as well
The upshot of this is that it's much easier to make a 2D game with a scrolling framebuffer, because all you have to do is update the scroll registers and draw the newly revealed parts of the map, which is usually only a few rows of columns of pixels
it amuses me when people find out the #Mega68k has a 240x135 resolution because they always go "but 135 isn't divisible by 8!" as if that's some kind of hard and fast rule about resolutions
(it is multiplicative by 8 though and the result is 1080)
#Mega68k As a debug test of exploding things, I put it so the big "plasma blob" bullet would explode when you pressed the fire button a second time, just as a test hack.
But... actually it's really fun! I think I'll leave it in. You can time the second press to wipe out groups of enemies (at the start of the clip), or just let it travel through to damage multiple in a row (at the end of the clip).
I wrote a bit about the Mega68k fantasy console on cohost. Specifically a bunch of stuff about how the color system came to be (6 bit + 2 bit alpha), you'll wanna scroll down until you see a palette for that one: https://cohost.org/eniko/post/1985587-funny-story-i-actua
GIF is Archetype which is being made for #Mega68k by @TomF
#Mega68k game progress. We're into the "actual working gameplay" slog now - implementing the huge variety of enemies and motions and so on that I want to do.
This time - mines and kamikaze enemies! Simple in concept, but surprisingly complex in execution. Anyway, they work great, which is satisfying.
As always, ART IS NOT REPRESENTATIVE - because it's all stolen from R-Type right now 🙂 (although I did make the mines blink all by myself)
Updating some old pieces.
Not really sure what the exact sprite capabilities this Amiga 1001 would be, but the chip might suitably be called uh... squints Scheherazade.
@androidarts@efi As it happens, myself and @eniko have been working on a fantasy console from 1990 that is essentially the lovechild of an Amiga and a MegaDrive. It does indeed have a byte-per-pixel framebuffer, but it's funky, and has a bunch of MegaDrive-like sprite and tile plane features. #Mega68k
Game progress:
main menus
buying weapons
level selection
sound adjustments
Gradius-style powerup ladder
R-Type-style sidekicks (not shown in this video)
Emulator progress:
Record+replay of inputs.
Stream to GIF or MPEG
Look at those lovely smooth 60fps bullets! (rest of the game runs at 30fps)
Took a break from the game to do a pretty demo on the #Mega68k. This shows a scrolling "infinite" framebuffer with only the edges updating.
I also did a system where it only updates as many pixels as it can in a 60th, so the scrolling always remains fast, but you get low-quality updates. Sit still for a bit and it fills in.
Man I wish I had more time to work on side projects like #Mega68k but right now I gotta be laser focused on getting Kitsune Tails done and out to market since that's what's needed for continued financial survival :/
Huge progress on the #Mega68k game, but no screenshots because it's all about audio! I have autoconversion of .WAV files to the native format and whatever frequency you want (choose low - there's only 64k of audio RAM!).
And then dynamic loading and playing at runtime. And I have an "audio manager" that looks at the sound requests and picks the "most important" (for some programmable definition) 4 channels to play.