Sirocco wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2024 3:25 am
Very nice. Hopefully one day someone will make a demo (as in demoscene) for your platform. That would be sweet
Would be nice, but I would not count on it.
Right now there is barely anyone even playing the games...
Who knows, maybe one day a streamer will make the console go viral.
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2024 4:27 pm
by Sonrisu
You might be able to drum up some more interest by streaming/making videos of building out that commercial game you were talking about:
… going to invest so much time in a game, why not go the extra mile and try to make a commercial game? So that's what I'm going to do from now on
:]
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:56 am
by carra
Sonrisu wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2024 4:27 pm
You might be able to drum up some more interest by streaming/making videos of building out that commercial game you were talking about:
It is a good idea but I don't think it would work for me for 2 reasons.
Normally I work on my projects at short bursts, like maybe pick it up 3 or 4 times in the evening and doing a little thing. Some days I may do longer things but that is usually unplanned.
Also the type of game I will be making relies a lot on exploration and finding unknown things. I want to avoid showing too much of the game or that experience will not be the same.
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Wed Jan 01, 2025 11:13 am
by carra
Happy 2025!
Sirocco wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2024 3:25 am
Very nice. Hopefully one day someone will make a demo (as in demoscene) for your platform. That would be sweet
Well, not sure if this counts as demoscene but I just made the obligatory Bad Apple tech demo for the console:
In case someone here does not know, Bad Apple has become a bit like Doom and many machines try to display this video.
Vircon32 is not able to display video, and the cartridge has not enough capacity to just store all frames. So I had to develop some frame encoding/reconstruction techniques by splitting the monochrome images in scanlines and drawing horizontal segments. The final size is under 64MB including the music which for almost 4 minutes of video is not bad I'd say!
If anyone is interested, both the demo and the PC encoder program I made to compress the video are open source.
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:49 am
by Sirocco
Hey, that's a really damn nice project. So did you have to do much more than RLL encoding to get it all to fit??
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 7:34 am
by carra
Sirocco wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:49 am
Hey, that's a really damn nice project. So did you have to do much more than RLL encoding to get it all to fit??
Not even that, it was very simple: just store, for each scanline, a sequence of black segments (start x, end x). And have a couple of codes for new line and new frame. That's it, no compression or anything.
Even just with that the algorithm achieves a decent size: the 3m 38s of video only take 26MB.
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2025 12:37 am
by Sirocco
Oh, that's clever. I guess a minor optimization would be to parse each frame and see if there are more white or black pixels, and store the data for the color with the least data. But I doubt the savings would be worth it, considering that you have got the job done, and that's 110% the important part
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2025 8:27 am
by BadMrBox
carra wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 11:13 am
Happy 2025!
Sirocco wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2024 3:25 am
Very nice. Hopefully one day someone will make a demo (as in demoscene) for your platform. That would be sweet
Well, not sure if this counts as demoscene but I just made the obligatory Bad Apple tech demo for the console:
In case someone here does not know, Bad Apple has become a bit like Doom and many machines try to display this video.
Vircon32 is not able to display video, and the cartridge has not enough capacity to just store all frames. So I had to develop some frame encoding/reconstruction techniques by splitting the monochrome images in scanlines and drawing horizontal segments. The final size is under 64MB including the music which for almost 4 minutes of video is not bad I'd say!
If anyone is interested, both the demo and the PC encoder program I made to compress the video are open source.
Thats cool!
Re: Vircon32: Creating my own console
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 7:58 am
by carra
Thanks BadMrBox!
Maybe this can also be interesting. The console has no 3D but here the pseudo 3D perspective is done by decomposing walls in scanlines, and drawing them with the correct scaling to match perspective.
