20 December 2009

I have received several comments about PIPER. I will try to repond to them:

"I would like to see the code..."

Well, I think the code is just a mess, partially written in spanish and english...for thi reason I don´t think this will help you. There are also a lot of variables reused in order to save RAM, so It is really difficult to read and understand.

If you want to see the code, please check this.

I wish I could buy it!

Oh thanks!. I also would like to buy a kind of PSP or DS just designed for Roguelikes...

At this stage, PIPER v1.0 is just a curiosity. Of course It is compact, nice, long battery life...but I think It still needs an small redesign. I am currently working in PIPER v2.0, that would have 4 times more memory and the batteries integrated inside the PCB. Maybe then I could build one for you.

Also I am thinking in changing the Graphic LCD system. KS0108 is cheap and nice, but really slow...Maybe with a faster LCD I can program some clones of Galaga, Pacman, Tetris or so?!?

 

13 December 2009

Thanks for all the comments I have received! One important question is:

Can you make a (full) port of rogue?

Well I think It is not possible to port (full) rogue to a micro smaller than atmega128.
While programming piper I studied rogue code and you need a lot of rom...but the most important...ram! The problem is that with this microcontrollers you cannot increase ram nor rom. Other problem, not so obvious is the bad management of recurssive functions...and also lack of (decent) stack.
I think that with a 8051 with 64 k of both rom and ram you could try. But this will need a more complicated and less portable pcb.
Of course you can buy an ultrasophisticated ARM cortex board and program It...but you will miss that retro flavour. In this case I would buy a notebook and just play.
I am currently working on the PIC18f2550 verion of piper, that will increase x4 Rom and Ram.With this I feel confident on doing a less basic roguelike game.

11 December 2009

What is P.I.P.E.R?

P.I.P.E.R is a recursive acronym that means "PIPER Is a Portable Embedded Roguelike". It is currently a PIC16f876 microcontroller single board computer, battery powered,  that can be easily programmed to run a "light" roguelike game version. Eight user buttons are provided and a graphical LCD (KS0108 driven, 128x64 pixels) is used as screen.

Why P.I.P.E.R?

I have been working with ucontrollers as a hobbyst for more than ten years. Few months ago I became interested in Roguelike games. For those who doesn´t know Roguelikes (AKA RL) are old ascii driven Role Playing Games with amazing interaction posibilities. Good examples are Rogue, Angband, Moria and Nethack.

One of the things that disapointed me was the lack of true portable roguelikes. Only saw calcrogue, but unfortuntely needs a type of calculator I don't have. I thought that with only a few low end chips It could be possible to do the job so...why not try to do this?

Other thing that encouraged me was that "ucontroller roguelike" returned no matches in google so, I decided to start doing the job.