Arduboy games on Pokitto

Hello,

I saw a few YouTube videos showing that the arduboy library of games (open source) will easily run on the Pokitto. And they can be colorized as well.

Is this something that we can just add to our pack of games on the SD card? Is this something in the works for the next versions of the pack?

Or will there need to be a more detailed process to accomplish this?

(Btw - I have an arduboy and arduboy Tetris. I think it’d be cool to play some of these titles on a bigger device and with color)

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there are ports here in the games tab that are ports
you can have a look at there source code to see how they are ported

There’s a port of the Arduboy2 library* and the Arduino EEPROM library but many of the other Arduino functions are missing, so stuff like delay would have to be swapped out.

There’s no emulation or trickery, just leveraging C++'s “write (almost) once and compile (almost) anywhere (restrictions may apply)” design to turn standard C++ code using one set of libraries into standard C++ code using another set of similar-looking libraries, hence it compiles to Pokitto machine code and works just like any other Pokitto game.

If you’re thinking about porting something, be sure to ask the original owner. As I said in another thread recently: technically if they’ve got an open source licence then you don’t have to, but it’s nice to ask anyway.


* The Sprites.drawPlusMask implementation was one of my very first contributions :D.

@Pharap Thanks for the detailed information. A game that I really enjoy on the arduboy is Castleboy. I just messaged the creator his thoughts on a port on Pokitto.

I have to admit, I have no idea what you are talking about as far as changing and compiling the code to make it work.

But, I guess the first step is to ask the creator as you mentioned. If he is ok with it, I could give it a go with guidance. Or he may want to add color and port it.

There are a lot of cool Team-Arg games that would be cool to play as well. Do you know who to ask or I would have to ask every member on the team?

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You should look at this post

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Thanks for the link! Wow, glad to hear the arduboy community is on board for porting to the Pokitto.

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How much exactly do you want to know?

The really short handwavey version is that the C++ gets turned into machine code and that the Arduboy and Pokitto run different types of machine code (AVR and ARM, respectively).
They also have different hardware, so that has to be accounted for by the code ‘somehow’.

JO3RI and Trodoss are the founders so they’d probably be the best ones to ask.

Their website states that you can contact them either via Twitter or (if you’re old-school like me) by emailling them at info@team-arg.org.


Part of that is because there’s a large overlap between the two.
No doubt you’ve spotted me on both, and prominent Arduboy forum members like @eried (famous for creating the biggest Arduboy game repo) also own a Pokitto and visit here.

@Pharap
I admire coders and programmers. I will never get there myself, being in my 40’s with a depleting memory, but I’m always intrigued and interested in the process. Throw in a few kids that take up a chunk of my time…

I love these devices and the retro nature to them. Brings back the good times and I want my kids involved in that.

That being said, I guess my role in the community will be more of motivation, feedback, and inspiration.

dir3kt - Joel got back to me about Castleboy.

He said that he would love for someone to try and port his game to Pokitto. He doesn’t really have the time to do it himself. He also said that the game is licensed under MIT so anybody is free to do whatever with it.

He wanted to add color to it and port it to gamebuino meta, but lost interest. He sent a picture of a color mock-up:

It’s a short game, but the level design and bosses are unique for this hardware. If anyone also has interest… Please try to at least port the black and white version.

I will send out a message to team arg to see what they think about ports to Pokitto.

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I think it depends how good you are with problem solving, logic, language and maths.

Until about 6-7 years ago I didn’t know the difference between MBs and GBs were or what RAM was, I’d never done any programming and I only got a B in my maths GCSEs.
Now I sit here having written a C++ library for fixed point arithmetic using templates (which are regarded as one of the most difficult aspects of C++ to learn).
If you’d told me back then that I’d be writing a library for mathematics I probably would have laughed and said “pull the other one”.

It’s surprising where life takes you and what you can achieve with enough determination.

Maybe you won’t make it to writing a template library, but I’m sure you could at least stretch to Pong if you can find the time.

You’re not an artist or a lawyer then? :P

I can relate.

That’s pretty much what I would have expected. I expect it’ll be the same for any other games you ask about. It’s still good to ask though, the author will probably want to know it’s being ported and might even ask if it’s done so they can give it a thumbs up or seal of approval.

Neat.

Might be worth making a topic about it in the help wanted section.

I expect they’ll be happy with it. From what I know of him, JO3RI is fairly reasonable and friendly.

@Pharap That’s always the case isn’t, never enough time. My free time is closely monitored by my wife. haha Until I get the man cave, which will probably never happen, being that I live in Tokyo where space is at a premium.

I put a listing up for Castleboy. I hope it gets the attention that it deserves. I also sent out that email to team-arg. They have a lot of fantastic games that would look great on the Pokitto (in color would be a unique bonus).

Thanks again for the feedback and insight.

Yep. In my case it’s always “too many interesting projects and not enough time”.

I live in Britain, our houses are very slightly smaller than Japan’s houses (on average), so I understand the space thing.
I don’t have a wife or children though, so I can’t sympathise there.

I see it.
That category is going to come in handy.

They do indeed.

That’s a bit more work because it means the Pokitto version of the Arduboy2 library can’t be used.

No problem. I try to be helpful where I can be.

27 posts were merged into an existing topic: Arduboy Hat Idea

To prevent this getting lost in migration:

Can’t be done automatically. Unlike the Gameboy, most modern systems don’t use sprites, there is no way to tell which graphics are being drawn as background and which are characters.
What I would suggest though, would be to read whatever value is set for the Arduboys RGB LED and colorize the screen based on that.

That would work if anyone ever actually used the LED.
I can probably count on one hand the number of games that do.

…it could be done automatically for games that make use of the Arduboy2 library’s sprite implementation at least:

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