Grand opening of Simulator coming soon

Hello all

It is clear that I am struggling to do all the coding that is needed. And it is unnecessary, because clearly we have skilled people on these forums that can develop new features to Pokitto on their own.

Therefore I am going to start opening the Simulator code to all of you as soon as I get back home.

Things to do…

Sound:

  • make sound work on all OS’s
  • synthetisator sounds

Graphics modes:

  • tiled graphics modes
  • 128x128 “Pico 8” mode
  • tinyArcade mode (96x64@256 colors)
  • 220x176@16 color mode (yes, it is possible, although needs lotsa RAM)

File system:

  • file selector (in progress)

Menus & virtual keyboard

  • graphics style improvement, getting rid of legacy limitations

Simulator:

  • simulate I/O’s with console prints and/or button inpus as digital inputs

… anything else we’ve spoken about ?

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thats the most of it
file system and synth sound are much appreciated

Oooo… does it mean we would be able to technically port our Pico-8 games?

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Pico-8 would be an excellent idea! A lot of great games:-)
I just hope that scaling of Pico screen to the native Pokitto resolution do not affect too much to the quality of the graphics.

Pico-8 gives people more reasons to purchase Pokitto, and there is still hi-res native mode for making high quality Pokitto games too. That is a bit like playing Wii games on WiiU until the native game library is good enough for selling the device alone.

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128x128 fits naturally, no scaling needed

Ok, what is the native resolution of the LCD in Pokitto?

The pokitto screen probably matches the simulator 220x174. I think that having the 128x128 screen 1:1 pixel centered, then the possibility of adding a border graphic of some sort, like the super gameboy? That would be cool. It could probably be done without taking up much RAM by direct pixeling from a pico8.bmp on the MicroSD card?

220x176 to be exact. So 128x128 fits without scaling on both axis

That’s what I mean, I was typing from memory, too lazy to look it up :stuck_out_tongue:

Simulator repo is going to be updated today. It can be broken during the day, so take care to read the latest commit messages before cloning.

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Wow. This is getting really interesting. In order to allow maintennance to work across all systems, I need to link the github repo to mbed repo and possibly split the repo into submodules… hmmm…

Edit: explanation: the hardware target uses exactly the same core as the sim. I want to maintain the core so that no matter if you work on sim, hardware or on online mbed IDE, the core is always up to date.

Edit2: this is not a problem, its just setting up things in the right way.

Edit3: but it means the core should be its own submodule

2 Likes

I am already testing the new release. Won’t be long anymore.

Some slight fixing still needed

Ok its compiling now.

Edit: problems with compile switches, can not turn screencapture on/off

Edit: its running though, no problems

Edit: found it, uploading repo soon

Edit: its up now, please test!

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I am not huge fan of using big borders on screen, but that is maybe the best we can do without having a GPU ( I suppose) to handle proper scaling of lo-res screen modes.