What's Up? Discussion - what's going on, what going to come next

Since I can’t be everywhere at the same time, I am going to be keeping a list right here so you know whats going on.

If you want to add stuff, wishes, wish me to change priorities on things, comment below

Pokitto Kickstarter units

First shipments out of USA tomorrow. More boards for more shipments from EU coming next week.

Pokitto website

Webshop coming up 25th (so I’ve been promised, let’s see if we can deliver)

Pokitto library & toolchains

In order of business:

  1. Get sound working in online IDE. Requires hardware debugging done
  2. Some more source codes & games up to online IDE done, more coming
  3. Get loader working reliably done
  4. Fuse together PokittoLib and PokittoSim so same codebase works on both done
  5. Basic graphics tutorial (making your own bitmaps and using them) (for @Zuzu36)
  6. Palette & colors tutorial (for @Zuzu36)
  7. Updated API documentation (suggested by @adekto)
  8. … then? Comments?
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This is when I hope the US has 1-day shipping, because my birthday is Sunday :stuck_out_tongue: I’m getting an Arduboy for it, so I’m fine, but it would be awesome to get two retro consoles then :smiley:

Really can’t wait for fusion of the PokittoLib and the simulator, because Blocky World will require an SD card, so it would be a bit of a pain in the butt to test on HW…

I got the sound working again. And it was a stupid stupid mistake

soundInit was wrapped like this:

#if POK_ENABLE_SOUND > 1
soundInit();
#endif

Well, if POK_ENABLE_SOUND is true, its value is 1… so when is it going to be > 1 ? Exactly.

Please update your projects to newest PokittoLib and sound will begin working again.

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I’d like to see a tutorial for setting up a custom screen mode…

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Micro/circuit python tutorial?

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What aspects of MicroPython need explanation most urgently?

  • Creating Pyhton applications and games in Pokitto ?
  • Explanation of new Python classes and methods of Pokitto MP over standard MicroPython ?
  • Building/extending Pokitto MicroPython library itself ?
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I’d say there’s one critical thing: A walkthrough creating and installing an application/game, then accessing it in the REPL for testing.

The ability to create instances interactively in the REPL and then play with them - especially if the classes have good docstrings - can go a long way towards documenting the pokitto specific classes, if you’ve shown people how to use that ability.

So second would be pointers to the appropriate documentation. Micropython.org doesn’t seem to have docs for an nxp port, so I’m not sure what to use. A list of differences could be nearly as important, depending on what they are and if they show up in the REPL.

Hey Jonne, how about doing an appearance on twit.tv’s Floss weekly podcast? Takes an hour or two, and give you a chance to explain the project to a wide audience of people interested in open source software and hardware. I don’t think they’ve done one of the open source gaming platforms yet, so it could draw a lot of interest.

I did one with the founder of deviationtx, and it was a lot of fun, even though I was a poor guest. If you’re interested, send email to the host (address in the page linked above) asking about it. I think they like more than one representative, so maybe Hanski or even your son as it seems like he had a lot of input into the project.

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That’s an excellent idea

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I and lots of others would definitely watch and listen to that

The 8-bit guy (a really cool youtube channel with a good following) just reviewed Arduboy, I bet he would be happy to review Pokitto as well.

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I must admit, reading the comments most of the people were expressing their desire for a small console with a colour screen larger than 128x64, so it could be a good opportunity.

Then again, I also get the impression people just want exact clones of old consoles including clones of the games that were on those consoles.

Also if the guy had that much problem putting a game on an Arduboy (which to me looks like he either didn’t bother to properly read the instructions or purposely made it look hard for some reason) he’d probably get the OSX hidden file bug and blame the Pokitto.

(I didn’t watch all of it, but what I did see didn’t leave me with a very good impression of him to be honest.)

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To be honest, this video was really below his standards…

He did couple videos of some of those new famicom Chinese knock offs and those pretty good as videos. To be honest, the bulk of his channel is working with old computers, but I still think pokitto would be down his alley (but probably later on, when there is more resources for it available :slight_smile: )

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I might have a look sometime at his other stuff for the sake of curiosity, but I’m not the kind of person who follows ‘youtubers’ or watches that sort of video.

Youtube isn’t short of tech reviewers though, I think when the time comes it would be worthwhile to selectively pick reviewers to gift Pokittos to. (It’ll have to be after the website to buy them goes up and there are more games available, else it would be futile.)

By selectively I mean picking ones that are most likely to give good reviews. A good review to 100 followers is more useful than a mediocre review to 200 followers. Also channel relevance is important, as is picking someone who isn’t likely to loose credibility for saying something stupid and offensive.

@jonne could you please add “How to save things on SD card/simulate it on simulator tutorial” on the list?
A quick guide would be great too :grin:
EDIT:
“How to use tranparent color?” would be nice too.

1 Like