P.O.C. Chuckie Egg on Taito L System
- Thread starter cmonkey
- Start date
I didn't mention the others as i thought i heard on the podcast that someone was going to do it already.
I pick on T&F and HS specifically because Hyper Sports boards are getting very hard to find.
While the hardware is physically different, they share a lot of commonalities.
I'm not sure yet how JROK implements the differences between Williams boards as Defender, Joust and Robotron aren't completely identical - similar, but not identical.
The only thing I can think of currently is to have the menu control the rest of the logic so it programs the fpga as required, otherwise you're rewriting the schematic to cover both.
Hmmm, all things to ponder but for another thread....
I pick on T&F and HS specifically because Hyper Sports boards are getting very hard to find.
While the hardware is physically different, they share a lot of commonalities.
I'm not sure yet how JROK implements the differences between Williams boards as Defender, Joust and Robotron aren't completely identical - similar, but not identical.
The only thing I can think of currently is to have the menu control the rest of the logic so it programs the fpga as required, otherwise you're rewriting the schematic to cover both.
Hmmm, all things to ponder but for another thread....
RGP said:I'm thinking this tiny island used to run the world, now we buy everything from america and pay import tax and post office handling fees.
Why are we waiting to be drip fed?
I guess i'll have to be the evil one - AGAIN!
Things on my long term project list include:
FPGA implementation of Konami GX hardware for Track & Field / Hyper Sports
Similar for Midway card rack system.
Why? why not?
Oh, and all open shared in the community.
Why? because thats the right thing to do!
Well said.
backflipper
Active member
machum said:
Cool.
Did he not post an example or was that or other hardware....
Looking forward to you work.
machum said:
Hi machum! I guess I must have stimulated something deep inside you for you to make your first post on this fine forum 13 months after signing up here! Welcome to UKVAC!
I don't have any official documentation on the TC0090LVC, I wrote to Taito asking them for more info on the amazing chip that powers the L System boards but they wouldn't divulge anything, unfortunately. So everything I've learned about coding for it has come from either reversing the boot process of Plotting/Puzznic, the MAME source or from my own experimentation in testing stuff in MAME and then on hardware. In the process of doing so I've found 'issues' where MAME doesn't accurately emulate the L System, but to me that's half the fun of learning to code for a partially documented system!
I have tons of scribbled notes in amongst the source for my tech demo. I guess I could extract the notes and put them into some kind of doc, but this will take a few days as I have real life chores to catch up on for a while.
Maybe it would be advantageous to carve the boot code out of my demo and release that. At least then people have got a framework to start with. Once the hardware is brought up then it's simply a case of adding you own code to the main game loop.
So, tell us all a little bit more about your coding experience then. I'm guessing that you probably have a sound backing in Z80 if you're interested in coding for a Z80 based target. Did you used to be a game coder or demo writer back in the Spectrum/CPC days? Do you know other languages like 6809/6502/68000?
You should post a quick 'hello' in the New Users section, introducing yourself. We're generally a good bunch of people here and promise that we won't bite!
Many thanks for the info cmonkey.
If you are happy to share something like the boot code (on github maybe?) it would be fantastic and I would be very grateful. Otherwise I could also look at reverse engineering from the ground up but would seem a waste to duplicate effort ?
I have rusty Z80/6502 experience from long ago but lots of recent experience with C and more modern architectures inc embedded type h/w. I've also contributed to numerous Open Source projects.
Apologies for no introduction! I will fix that now
If you are happy to share something like the boot code (on github maybe?) it would be fantastic and I would be very grateful. Otherwise I could also look at reverse engineering from the ground up but would seem a waste to duplicate effort ?
I have rusty Z80/6502 experience from long ago but lots of recent experience with C and more modern architectures inc embedded type h/w. I've also contributed to numerous Open Source projects.
Apologies for no introduction! I will fix that now
It's great to have a prospective arcade homebrew coder onboard.
I don't have a github account, but could always create one.
Give me a few days to tidy up my notes on L System and I'll get some kind of doc together which gives an intro to coding for it.
Maybe, with your C experience, you can enhance the BMP-to-sprite/tile converter that I quickly knocked up for L System. At the moment it only handles 16x16 pixel 4-bit BMPs which means making large tile backgrounds or huge sprites a laborious task. Ultimately it would be nice to have the tool accept a BMP of arbitrary size (multiple of 16) and do the splitting of the image into 8x8 tiles or 16x16 sprites automatically and pump out the associated palette for each 16x16 chunk. That's the plan for the future, anyway.
Looking forward to see an example or two of your work one day.
Do you have an eprom programmer/emulator so that you can test your own code on the board itself?
I don't have a github account, but could always create one.
Give me a few days to tidy up my notes on L System and I'll get some kind of doc together which gives an intro to coding for it.
Maybe, with your C experience, you can enhance the BMP-to-sprite/tile converter that I quickly knocked up for L System. At the moment it only handles 16x16 pixel 4-bit BMPs which means making large tile backgrounds or huge sprites a laborious task. Ultimately it would be nice to have the tool accept a BMP of arbitrary size (multiple of 16) and do the splitting of the image into 8x8 tiles or 16x16 sprites automatically and pump out the associated palette for each 16x16 chunk. That's the plan for the future, anyway.
Looking forward to see an example or two of your work one day.
Do you have an eprom programmer/emulator so that you can test your own code on the board itself?
cmonkey said:
I could take my bitmap tiling code from my XNA game engine which can already do this with arbitrary images and arbitrary tile sizes Ade. Need some info on the palette stuff to know what format that needs to be in.
witchfinder
User
Nice work, but the BBC Micro version of Chuckie Egg is far superior!
That would probably make a lad from school very happy, he loved Chuckie Egg on his I think... though its so long ago, Dragon32. other mate used to ask him every day "got any new games yet anup, No" then finally one day he asked him he said "yes, Chuckie Egg 2"
You just amaze me with all this stuff
You just amaze me with all this stuff
Sokurah said:
Agree completely Ade, did an amazing reverse engineering job on this, fantastic little hardware bundle. Time as always in the biggest factor.
Hurray Banana said:
A big chunk of the hard work was already done by MAMEdev. All I did was reverse the boot process for Plotting and Puzznic so that I could bring the hardware up from cold boot to a clean slate. The real thanks needs to go to whoever wrote the Taito L driver, as I used it extensively it my work.
cmonkey said:
Underselling your efforts there a mate. Reversing is a bit of a complicated chore, which I avoid. I would not probably of started any of this work without your boot sequence for Pac-Man. I could of looked at Paul Shirley's spindizzy code on the amstrad, but chose not too as I wanted to find my own solutions and I didn't want to wade through someone else's code structure.