Hi! I wanted to share the hardware project I've been working on for the last five years, that I hope will be interesting to some people here.
The GameTank is a dual-6502 console with blitter/framebuffer based graphics and software-controlled PCM audio, and analog outputs. It has two Genesis-style 9-pin controller ports. The cartridge system leaves room for expansion hardware, and the current standard cartridge design has 2MB flash memory accessible as 16KB banks.
The hardware design itself was frozen two years ago as far as software-breaking changes are concerned, but may be adjusted periodically to account for parts sourcing and manufacturing convenience. Lately I've been focusing on documentation and tooling development. So far I've still made most of the games but I've gotten a couple friends and even people online I've never met making games with the C SDK. (Well, one of them skipped the SDK and made Rust tooling so there's that too!)
I've made both DIY kit and prebuilt surface mount versions of the hardware, but it's also got an official emulator available for Win/Mac/Linux/Wasm.
Periodically I've been hosting game jams to encourage developers to try out the platform, and I'll be doing another one in two weeks: https://itch.io/jam/gametank-game-jam-3
The SDK handles bmp/midi import and ROM bank setup, and also provides convenience functions for common operations like drawing sprites and playing music.
Some of the games existing for the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_nM9as4VQ&t=47s
The GameTank is a dual-6502 console with blitter/framebuffer based graphics and software-controlled PCM audio, and analog outputs. It has two Genesis-style 9-pin controller ports. The cartridge system leaves room for expansion hardware, and the current standard cartridge design has 2MB flash memory accessible as 16KB banks.
The hardware design itself was frozen two years ago as far as software-breaking changes are concerned, but may be adjusted periodically to account for parts sourcing and manufacturing convenience. Lately I've been focusing on documentation and tooling development. So far I've still made most of the games but I've gotten a couple friends and even people online I've never met making games with the C SDK. (Well, one of them skipped the SDK and made Rust tooling so there's that too!)
I've made both DIY kit and prebuilt surface mount versions of the hardware, but it's also got an official emulator available for Win/Mac/Linux/Wasm.
Periodically I've been hosting game jams to encourage developers to try out the platform, and I'll be doing another one in two weeks: https://itch.io/jam/gametank-game-jam-3
The SDK handles bmp/midi import and ROM bank setup, and also provides convenience functions for common operations like drawing sprites and playing music.
Some of the games existing for the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_nM9as4VQ&t=47s
Statistics: Posted by Agumander — Fri Oct 04, 2024 12:56 pm — Replies 3 — Views 187