With the current version, I consider the emulator essentially finished. Everything I had planned to include is done. For the future there will only be bug fixes, small improvements, or later down the road trying to port the emulator to other systems to make Vircon as accessible as possible.
On the other hand I have restructured the downloads, so that each part is more independent. This also makes it clearer to know different things are included in the project. Now the files that you can download are these:
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Emulator
The emulator to open Vircon32 roms.
Includes the BIOS and the program to change the keyboard and joystick controls.
Example roms
A small pack of roms to test the emulator.
It includes test programs, the tutorial roms and the Arkanoid demo.
Currently there are no finished games yet, I'm making the first one.
Documents
The guides that explain how the console works and how to create games.
They are PDF documents, with English and Spanish versions.
Development tools
It's a pack of programs with which you can create games for Vircon32.
It includes assembler, C compiler, rom packer and programs to import images,
sounds and game maps. It also includes the standard compiler library.
Source code for the roms
Includes the sources (C code, images, sounds, tilemaps, etc.) for all the
programs in the example roms pack.
Also included is the source code for the BIOS and a small example of how
to use an IDE (Code::Blocks) to compile for Vircon.
In addition to the above there are also a couple of small example tutorials
for creating programs in Vircon. They will be expanded in the future.
I was trying to compose a video that shows several programs working on the console, and I realized that among the console test programs, there is none that tests audio. I have created this little beat editor, that will also serve to test timing in addition to sound itself.
I have already added this new program to the downloads, both in the roms pack and the sources.
And the more stuff you can pack in, the easier it will be for people to grasp what's available and how to accomplish things. I hope the project gains traction.
I have created this video explaining what games in the console will be like:
This is mainly so that anyone can see games and programs running in the console without downloading anything. And also to see if I am able to create a little hype with it
I have been working on the Triple Bubble demo. I have just created the menu system, which you can see in this video.
Now I will have to redo and complete most of the gameplay. For the demo I will focus only on the single player modes, and the idea is having just 2 or 3 levels for the Classic and Triple modes. The rest will be left for the full game.
I've never looked into the "fantasy console" scene. I do know of one or two popular ones, but I'm guessing (just like the old indie RPG scene from forever ago) there are scads and scads of half-finished projects that never got any traction. It's good to see this one progressing.
I don't think there are many fantasy consoles out there. There are the Pico8 and the TIC-80, and that's mostly it. Then you have some new retrocomputer projects (not fantasy, but actual hardware) like the Maximite and Commander X16. But that's about it I believe. Whenever someone talks about a "new retro console" it's usually just some custom emulation machine.
As for mine, the only traction it has so far is that I still keep working on it! But I guess that's more that some other projects have XD
