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[skaldicpoet9]

Right on, when I was talking to Hideous about this thread in the first place I mentioned that what I was really interested in was NES (and DS of course) homebrew. I am definitely down with some of that action should you ever touch upon it 

I thought this had do to with making beer!

We could do that too! 

[moi]

Maybe it's better not to limit the platform? Maybe a theme could be more interesting?

[Guillaume]

I like the idea of platform-themed months better. I just find it cooler and more prone to sharing and discussing the actual development.

[Absurdist]

This is awesome, I'll try to participate.

[Cthulhu32]

Maybe it's better not to limit the platform? Maybe a theme could be more interesting?

Yeah it'd be awesome to just have a free for all, share your knowledge, but I think for this exercise/experiment we will have a focused platform. Part of that is for my own sanity, so I'm not going through like 4 different platform sources with different questions for each, and partly because it's good to focus on one topic when we get to extremely complicated systems. That way I can write python tools and quick tutorials for each individual platform.

But that is an interesting idea, maybe for a month we will have a "Free-for-all" where you use your favorite platform to create a demo or game with a specific theme. That would be pretty cool further down the line when we've all completed a few challenges, and we have a large list of platforms to choose from.

[Ivan]

I've written NES roms in 6502 ASM, so I can provide some insights into doing it.

[r.kachowski]

could someone with the skills possibly give a guide to what's going on in this example from the gbdk package - and answer some nooby questions?

galaxy.c

i would like to know what needs to be initialized, where the sprites are drawn and what's going on in the main loop.

also, are the _data arrays the pixel information for each sprite/frame? how are these defined with regards to dimensions and framerate?

[Solved]

Definitely going to try to participate with this one. I will be using asm. I've started to make a title screen and I'll probably learn how to make a noise sometime this week.

Question: What does setting the timer modulo do? I assumed the timer modulo was the time between timer interrupts, but it seems to be the opposite, the higher the timer modulo the less time between interrupts.

[Cthulhu32]

could someone with the skills possibly give a guide to what's going on in this example from the gbdk package - and answer some nooby questions?

galaxy.c

i would like to know what needs to be initialized, where the sprites are drawn and what's going on in the main loop.

also, are the _data arrays the pixel information for each sprite/frame? how are these defined with regards to dimensions and framerate?

Oooh thats a pretty cool one. I'll possibly break that one down, because its using a few interesting methods of doing sprites that we could apply to our own demos. One of the important parts is understanding the while(1) loop, thats the update function of the entire program. If you can understand what is being called there, the rest should be easy to understand as its mostly initting.

Definitely going to try to participate with this one. I will be using asm. I've started to make a title screen and I'll probably learn how to make a noise sometime this week.

Question: What does setting the timer modulo do? I assumed the timer modulo was the time between timer interrupts, but it seems to be the opposite, the higher the timer modulo the less time between interrupts.

According to the Gameboy Programming Info, Timer Modulo is the number thats loaded into Timer Counter every time Timer Counter is overloaded.

http://fms.komkon.org/GameBoy/Tech/Software.html -
"The contents of TIMEMOD are loaded into TIMECNT every time TIMECNT overflows."

I'll describe it more when we hit the month of HCC

[Solved]

Definitely going to try to participate with this one. I will be using asm. I've started to make a title screen and I'll probably learn how to make a noise sometime this week.

Question: What does setting the timer modulo do? I assumed the timer modulo was the time between timer interrupts, but it seems to be the opposite, the higher the timer modulo the less time between interrupts.

According to the Gameboy Programming Info, Timer Modulo is the number thats loaded into Timer Counter every time Timer Counter is overloaded.

http://fms.komkon.org/GameBoy/Tech/Software.html -
"The contents of TIMEMOD are loaded into TIMECNT every time TIMECNT overflows."

Of course, I get it now. I assume that the Timer Overflow interrupt happens whenever the value of the timer counter becomes more than 255 and the 8 bit variable it is stored in overflows. So if I set the timer modulo to 255, this will happen every count of the timer, at 254 every 2 counts and so on.

[Cthulhu32]

Here's another teaser for anyone who wants to get a little more hardcore:

http://gameboy.modermodemet.se/en/demos

particularly
Space Waste by Octarine - http://gameboy.modermodemet.se/en/demo/1
That thing comes with full source, not sure what compiler he used, but its all in ASM.

I think I'll have like 3 levels of challenges, and for the advance challenge I'll have a "make a plasma effect" or something. That way we can try to get all levels of programming expertise.

[Hideous]

Plasma effect in 4 shades of grey is going to be hard.

[roboprez]

Plasma effect in 4 shades of grey is going to be hard.

Now that would be cool!
I may skip out this month's challenge and brush up on my c/c++. I've never actually done anything other than actionscript or gml and I don't think either of those are any consoles native language.

[Cthulhu32]

I wanted to try out GBDK a bit to before I started getting into the first month and got people into this. I've actually discovered quite a few bugs and quirks about the C compiler that I can share when the month comes, and I worked through porting the 1 hour tetris clone to the Gameboy Color. (http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=192483)

Here is the demo rom as of 1-15:
 http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/misc/hcc/gb/tetris.1-15.gb

The rotations are chuggy and the colors are pretty harmful to the eyes, but its the first iteration so I just wanted to show it off a little :D I'll release source once I get the speed up to snuff, and I'll probably add a menu and everything so I have some basis to do a few tutorials.

[ArmchairArmada]

I've been wanting to do some small retro projects for fun.  Years ago I've played with GameBoy and GameBoy Advance C compilers.  I remember it was very easy to get a sprite moving around and interacting with a tilemap.  I've learned a lot more about game development since then and am curious about what I might be able to accomplish now.

One machine that I have a nostalgic fondness for is the Commodore 64.  I hope we get to visit a number of the old classic consoles, computers, and handhelds of the past.