Here's a little something I've knocked out in the last week. It's a clone of the 1981 classic Nintendo Game & Watch handheld title "Parachute". It's using the TVout lib, and I'm running on the Hackvision hardware, and I also have it running on my own breadboard variant. I do like the Hackvision though! I did make a few SW tweaks and have fed that back to Michael @nootropic.
Original box:
To anyone who's unfamiliar with the original G&W games they used an LCD with each animation frame as a defined graphic in the LCD. So animation is done by flipping cells on then off in a controlled manner. My code emulates that - and I feel it's pretty close to the real thing.
My clone:
The hardest part is getting decent looking graphics at 128x96 resolution! Pixel by pixel tweaking is required - I'm no artist so the bitmaps took almost as long as the code!
Apologies for the video quality - the game looks much nicer in real-life! It was late and I was using my iPhone4 in my right hand to record the video whilst I played the game with my left hand.
Once it's complete I'll post the code somewhere. Need to store hiscores in EEPROM and finish the sounds (beep beepity beep!)
I had a game like that when I was a kid where you were Peter Pan and you landed on Hook's ship, fought your way through a bunch of pirates and then at the end fought Hook to save Wendy. I played that thing so much I burned through enough batteries that my Mom sold it in a garage sale while I was at swim lessons. Had one perfect score on it that I could never duplicate and I still let my Mom know about how much I loved that game... maybe more than life itself. Maybe I need to remake that one.
I am curious about how the screens are being rendered. Are their several bitmaps on top of each other?
Not quite. I keep an array for each slot in the sky - each can essentially have one of 2 values (empty or occupied) - although there is a special case for saved paratroopers. There are 3 logical columns and each column is cycled through in turn. All of the bitmaps for each slot are pre-defined, and then simply displayed (or not) depending on the state of the sky array.
I've finished the code now so will post it soon - it's pretty basic stuff.
@Schmidtn - I'm sitting here at my parents right now - in front of me I have Donkey Kong (dual screen), Parachute, Fire, Popeye and Turtle Bridge. I think Fire might be next. These games formed a special part of my childhood too, so breathing new life to them is both fun and emotionally fulfilling. I also have a Galaxy Invader 1000 console that still works - it might make a nice clone as well.
Pixel by pixel tweaking is required - I'm no artist so the bitmaps took almost as long as the code!