Hi All,
Just to let you all know what the state of play is, as we're closing in on our release date for PropGFX Lite

Hardware wise,

We're currently waiting on delivery of
1) the propeller chips
2)  the legs/pins for our DIP40
they should be with us in about 2-3 weeks, then we can start building them.

Software wise,

I've just finalised serial COMMS, fastest I seem to be able to get it, is 900kb/s as I use just one cog to do handle serial and deciphering instructions.
We've also increased the onboard eeprom to 64KBytes to allow more fonts / graphics to be pre-loaded onto board, for later recall, ie, say you had a pic chip with a small amount of memory, you could pre-store your data on the eeprom with multiple pic program uploads to it, then just recall it with the main pic program that didn't have the graphics stored on it
so storing and retreiving data from eeprom is also going to be added to the comms cog.

Also, Sorry the forum has been quiet for a little while, I've been mega busy with work, which has taken all my free time up. ;(

Baggers

Just thought I'd update again , seems it wasn't the Lite side that was dying at >900Kbps lol, it was the fullduplexserial comms I was using on the test side, so I modified that side too, and the lite, quite happily plays at 1.7Mbps which I'm quite happy with, and that's all in one cog too
I knew it should have been a lot faster than 900Kbps lol

Although, just checked, and poor PIC owners will still only max out at 115200 sorry guys, you should get a propeller it rocks

Exciting.
Thanks Baggers

You're welcome

OK time for an update...

All the materials are in (finally) and we are nearly ready for the production run, just waiting for the solder paste stencil now.

Then production will commence and PropGFX Lite will be available from a new front end web shop.

Coley

yay not long now

Are they getting assembled by hand or do you have a house assembling them?

Hi JT.

Funnily enough I've just taken delivery of a table top reflow oven today so I guess for the first run they will be hand assembled.
Actually I have put the process in place with a fab house but I want to get the first dozen or so out for hard beta testing.

I will be in touch with you very soon....

Coley

Cool, sounds like a fun little bit of HW

Hi all, tis me again  
Just thought I'd let you know I've been squeezing as many features into this as possible in the 496 instructions in the comms cog, and have now added a Poly drawer cog, which can be in place of some render cogs, ie bitmap display using 2 render cogs + 4 poly cogs and you can feed it a poly list and get output like in the video, also if you wanted sprites with bitmap + polys, you can have 4 render cogs + 2 poly cogs, or 5 render cogs + 1 poly cog choice is yours all handled by setting a value in eeprom, and sending a reset command, you can read and write to eeprom now too, so you can even have your own boot up display and font it could even have sprites in the boot up display too.
anyway back to this demo, all the vertex rotation, and poly sorting and back face removal, is done by the host prop, currently in spin, hence the slow refresh rate, but that's the next port of call for me, optimize that to asm and you'll see a dramatic speed increase.

PS, the character is 398 Tri's in case you're wondering



Let me know what you think?

Yet again you have amazed me with you profficiency and speed!

We only talked about this last night FFS!!!!!!



Coley

Thx coley, and I recon I can get it 60 fps, when I get the maths into asm

Hi all,
It's me yet again lol.
Just an update I've now coded the vertex rotation and poly zsort and back face culling in asm, and gained a significant speed increase, next stage is to then spread that across multiple cogs for even more speed
You'll also notice, by this image posted, that the black borders in the middle, is the time it takes the PropGFX Lite to clear the screen and draw all the polys how good is that, showing there's plenty more grunt in there for another 2 ( 400 poly ) men easy PS, that's NTSC 60fps, you just need to get the data fast enough now, which should be sorted when I've got the processing done in multiple cogs.

Just another update, thought I'd show that the EXACT same unmodified code works exactly the same on PropGFX VGA too see picture

I think if you really want to move these things, get some AVR micros and make some demos for that. AVRs have a strong install base and you put up a demo that shows a game running and wire a joystick up to it and you should be good to go.

Maybe make an article along the lines of "Turn any AVR (whatever line you go with) into a video game console!" And you can show the quality and ease of use of the PropGFX Lite.

If you want to take a different angle, get a Basic Stamp and make a simple game out of that. Push it as an easy way to make games. Maybe see about setting up something with Parallax to make a mini game kit. I don't know the memory of a basic stamp, but it should be enough to make simple games like pacman and pong.

A third idea would be to use the Prop, but make a special version of Mike Green's basic to have the output be the PropGFX and allow input from the game controller. Then make example programs/games to use graphics functions from basic. So after all is said and done it would be like an 8bit computer with the basic interface and hardware graphics routines. Since the graphics are handled on the PropGFX, that frees up a lot of memory for basic.

Anyway that is what I would pursue if I was looking to sell this thing