Vircon32: Creating my own console

[carra]

New finished game: Solitaire

There is now another game available: the Vircon32 version of the classic card solitaire. As usual you can download it from the website, at itch.io, and the source code is uploaded at GitHub.

Here is my gameplay video with a full game session:



Coding the logic of this game was more complex than I anticipated. You need to adapt it to be played without a mouse, so cursor motion and simulating card drag via pick & drop both add quite a few cases to the control mechanics.

[carra]

Well, the console is beginning to have a small game catalog so I thought I could make a small "flyer" image showcasing all games that can be considered finished.

[carra]

Long post incoming!

I have been taking some steps to start creating physical versions of the console and its elements. The first thing I will make are the games. I am thinking about a Raspberry-based console, so I believe the most practical and simple option is that access to the games is done via USB (each game would be a flash drive with a single file that would be the game rom). I've been looking for a pendrive model with simple shapes and easy to fix in place into a cartridge, so I got these ones:



From this model I have created a 3D design for a cartridge containing the pendrive and with the external shape that we are looking for. The assembly would be done with 2 self-tapping screws, as follows:



The final cartridge will look as you see here. It will have a front sticker with the game logo or cover and a rear sticker with your typical warnings to not disassemble, etc.. Underneath, it has 2 chamfered cylindrical guides. These will help align the male USB with the console's female connector when inserting the game. At the front there is a slot to lock the cartridge when the console is turned on (similar to the SNES) and at the back there is an indentation that will serve as a handle to insert your fingers and remove the cartridge (similar to Genesis cartridges).



The inner design of the 2 case halves would be this one below.



Now I will have to try to make a 3D printed prototype of these parts. With it I will be able to test the fit, clearances, etc. And if it works well I will order them in high quality (resin) and create the stickers.

[Sirocco]

Holy cow, that's a big step forward. For the cartridge, you need to make sure the connector is robust and can handle a lot of random abuse. You might look into something big, like a breadboard stab with copper trace, ala the original NES carts (much smaller, obviously. I think you'd only need 4 or 8 traces for USB. Can't remember ATM).

[carra]

Holy cow, that's a big step forward. For the cartridge, you need to make sure the connector is robust and can handle a lot of random abuse. You might look into something big, like a breadboard stab with copper trace, ala the original NES carts (much smaller, obviously. I think you'd only need 4 or 8 traces for USB. Can't remember ATM).

Oh I'm not going that deep into hardware design. I'll try to use standard components and join everything together with the case and custom parts if needed. So I will just have a female USB plug in the console, and the male drive in each cartridge. I think that the cylindrical guides will prevent mispositioning and avoid damage to the components. But still, I will have to test it in a prototype

[carra]

Because of something I was asked at Discord, I realized that the suite of Vircon32 test programs did not include a program to test basic sound effects (volume, speed and loop) so I have uploaded a new one for that.



Thanks to this programs I detected 2 bugs in the emulator sound systems. To my knowledge they don't affect any current programs, but I have already pushed fixes to GitHub. I still have to make a new emulator release at some point though.

[carra]

What you see is an emulator of ANOTHER little virtual console called Chip-8. It is a very simple system that was used in some graphing calculators to make little games. In fact this one you see below is one of the most advanced. I already made this emulator for PC time ago, and since it is simple I ported it.



And no, I'm not posting in the wrong thread. This is an emulator running in Vircon32: an emulator inside another emulator . The chip-8 roms are loaded the only way possible, which is with the memory card. I have also made a small program that converts the roms to this format.

I added some little things like being able to change the colors of the screen:



Since chip-8 has 16 keys I had to map them using 2 Vircon32 gamepads. For each rom the controls can be different so there are several layouts to try to find the one that suits us best.

You can find the emulator in its itch.io project site.

[carra]

I just uploaded to the repo a library to handle tile maps. I think it will a big help for those of you who want to create a little game for Vircon. Included with this library (as in all libraries I make) is a small example program where you can see how to use it. But basically, once we define our map and tiles, using the map in a program would just look like this:



As you can see it is much shorter and simpler than having to program your own functions to draw tilemaps. Note that it also automates camera management to be able to scroll and draw on the screen according to the view we want.

Both the library and the example include many comments, but just in case the concepts are not clear, or for those who want to go deeper into how it is done, I have also included a small PDF documentation explaining the basic ideas.

[carra]

We already have the prototypes for the first Vircon cartridges!
This is what they look like:




I have also recorded a longer video, showing you the whole process I have followed to create these prototypes of cartridges and their boxes. The video is in Spanish but you can what I'm doing with the automatic subtitles.

[Sirocco]

I think it's difficult to overstate how nice it is to have a physical manifestation of your work :]