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Bee3 - Its alive!


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This is a demo of Rocketeer running on my Bee3 cartridge design (formerly known as Rev3) :-

 

 

The cart in the video is using the ATmega644 and supports games with the following specifications :-

  • Up to 32K words* of ROM space for a game and its data.
  • 1.5K words of RAM for game use.
  • 1K words of auto wear levelled EEPROM for high scores and game data.
* The cart driver code occupies the same flash space as the game. However, the game can use any Inty memory map layout but must use no more than 32K's worth of space (for this microcontroller).

 

The version of Rocketeer on the cart is being played in "god mode" so the avatar is invincible.

 

The same PCB is also compatible with the ATmega1284 and the ATmega324 which allows the design to scale with the game's requirements (by supplying more/less ROM/RAM as required).

 

This is a video of several of my vaporware/photoshop games :roll: running on the Bee3 :-

 

 

Apologies in advance for the video quality. I really need to get around to getting my RGB SCART video mod out the door so that I can use a real video capture device.

 

Still to do :-

  • Finish off the auto wear levelled EEPROM functionality.
  • Prepare the design for production.
  • Layout an new PCB and get some samples made up.
  • Test/debug on my NTSC Inty II.
  • Modify the multi-cart test code to test the cart continuously and unattended.
Oh... And this is how the cart has looked to me for a while :lol: :-

 

post-21935-0-57252800-1400439085_thumb.jpg

 

I had hoped to get the design finalised for Play at the start of the month but that didn't happen :(.

 

Anyways... Many thanks to Reboot for hosting the videos and nonner242, Kiwi and Mystery Musician for making the games shine.

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Unfortunately, at around 38K, plumply Miss Carol wouldn't fit in a Bee3.

 

Perhaps it's time for me to learn to compress data. :lol:

 

dZ.

 

Hopefully that is easier than compressing art. I really really wish I had just a few more tiles/sprites/colors on intelli. It would make a world of difference.

 

It not always fun to plan around limitations, but when things get rolling I feel unstoppable. Aand its nice to see the finished product...which are never finished enough for me..lol

Im sure Mr Bee hates my 400000000 revisions of every screen or sprite when im in the zone.

It fun to see old hardware being used/pushed for more than what it was in the heyday.

 

DZ just for the Intellidrive DVD add on.

im sure there will be plenty of space for your games on it. :)

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Sweet vapourware/photoshopping! :) Great artwork Nonner....now about those boxes....

Thanks cmart..

 

The boxes can be printed thru the option menu in the game. That way everone will have a choice of printing one of there own.

You will just need a Ecs and a keyboard/dot matrix printer and dongle adapter that will be released when the intellidrive dvd is release.

Hope that helps ya out on the box front. Should be a easy process. ; )

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Hopefully that is easier than compressing art. I really really wish I had just a few more tiles/sprites/colors on intelli. It would make a world of difference.

 

It not always fun to plan around limitations, but when things get rolling I feel unstoppable. Aand its nice to see the finished product...which are never finished enough for me..lol

I know just what you mean!

 

In my case is that the multiple levels, graphics, and animations data, all use a simple and naive storage approach that wastes space with duplicate or over-allocated entries.

 

The good thing is that, by ignoring the space problem, I was able to speed development with a very fast "draw-build-test" cycle.

 

The last changes made for the CvW grand prize blow up the ROM commitment to about 41.5K!!! :o

 

The challenge for my next game is to include more animations, more graphics, and more features in the same or smaller amount of ROM. :)

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Thanks cmart..

 

The boxes can be printed thru the option menu in the game. That way everone will have a choice of printing one of there own.

You will just need a Ecs and a keyboard/dot matrix printer and dongle adapter that will be released when the intellidrive dvd is release.

Hope that helps ya out on the box front. Should be a easy process. ; )

Perfect! Easy peasy you say? Sweet,

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Now that thw cats out of the bag.

That wont be released untill next summer or fall. Still in the beta stages. And we still dont have all the kinks worked out to saving files larger than 2gig to the solid state drive worked out. But yeah its coming along nicely.

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Who's working on the liquid cooling 1GHz overclocking project? I can't wait for multicore and hyperthreading.

Great! I'll get to port my CPUID code to another processor architecture! Just don't be as fubar and fickle as the Intel chips in regards to cache descriptors.

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Who's working on the liquid cooling 1GHz overclocking project? I can't wait for multicore and hyperthreading.

Dude, the Intellivsion has supported hyperthreading since 1981. I think Backgammon was the first game to use it.

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Unfortunately, at around 38K, plumply Miss Carol wouldn't fit in a Bee3.

Its a scalable design, so you'd just need to use the ATmega1284 on the same PCB. That'd give you :-

  • Up to 64K words of ROM for game code and data.
  • 7.5K words of RAM for game use.
  • 2K words of EEPROM for high score and game saves.

Perhaps it's time for me to learn to compress data. :lol:

Nah! Just create fun games quicker ;) :P,

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