Sections

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Playing with pixels

Being the old-hardware maniac I am, I bought an MKIII Myth flash card from ic2005.com to play my (regularly bought at flea markets) Master System games without having to keep all the carts around. A nice side-effect of flash carts is that they let you try your own code on game consoles: in short, you can write and play your own games!
I've already done some homebrew console development on Nintendo 64 and SEGA Saturn, but the Master System is a different beast: being older and more limited, high-level languages are out of the question (Well, actually you CAN use a C compiler: see z88dk), so I'll have some fun learning Z80 assembly!
In the meantime, I tried drawing a sample tileset (keeping hardware limitations in mind, and beware: I'm no artist!) for a game idea I have:
And here is a level mockup made with the tileset:

It's set in a weird farm... Will go more in depth describing it some other time, if I can go on developing the idea!

Friday, February 10, 2012

Project MAM - test run

This week I had enough time to dedicate to my Project MAM (the automatic flea-market-mapper) efforts (mainly because there was too snow outside to go to any real flea market) so I decided to finish sketching up the basic software and do a test run.
Example test run with Project MAM software

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Project MAM - alpha client hardware

I finally received my SparkFun GPS shield for Arduino so I can go on building my first Project MAM client! MAM is an acronym for Mappatura Automatica Mercatini which means automatic flea-market mapping in Italian.

Why would someone want to do this? I want to keep track of the size flea markets I visit and draw maps to show how and where the benches are placed. Doing this manually gets boring VERY fast, so a bit of automation is needed.