Recent Posts

31

Thumby / Re: Pico Pac - Tiny Pac Man - Finished!

« Last post by CoolieCoolster on November 11, 2021, 01:26:45 PM »

I'm not sure how much it would help as it seems that taking accurate photos of the Thumby's screen is difficult due to its size, but here's one of my nearly complete "NanoMem" game that someone with a pre-release Thumby took for me. As I personally find the default font to take up too much space, I've been using bitmaps as a means of using custom fonts, with the "TINYMEM" text on the title screen using the smallest legible font of three pixels tall. As the game's score is displayed via five pixel tall bitmap numbers separated by one pixel wide gaps, I'll ask the person who sent me the picture how legible the score for reference. Also, as the screen only seems to be roughly half the width of the device itself, while I'd have to do a calculation first, perhaps larger screens might not have a sufficient pixel density to be an accurate reference for the Thumby?

Edit: While the pixel density of a smartphone would have to be a multiple of that of the Thumby to be able to accurately represent how a game would look at the scale of the Thumby, as most smartphones should at least have a higher resolution than that of the Thumby, at least an estimate can be determined by seeing how legible the nearest multiples of 40x72 are. Not an exact method, but it should still be informative.

32

Thumby / Re: Pico Pac - Tiny Pac Man - Finished!

« Last post by bkumanchik on November 11, 2021, 12:36:29 PM »

Very impressive! 

33

Thumby / Re: Pico Pac - Tiny Pac Man - Finished!

« Last post by ccarson81 on November 11, 2021, 11:38:39 AM »

Coolie Coolster,

I really dig your mock up! I also started with a similar design. It looks GREAT when blown up to the scale you have shown. One thing I think a lot of developers are going to be disappointed by is the actual scale of the screen when the hardware arrives. It's TINY. I mean REALLY TINY. We are all seeing video with modern cell phones that are essentially acting like magnifying glasses. I had done some actual to scale testing on Android to get a feeling of what could actually been seen with the naked eye on the hardware. There is a reason why the Thumby team has the text scaled to one third of the entire screen by default. I've attempted to capture the effect of shrinking both your graphics and mine to scale with the attached screen shot from my Android device. Do NOT zoom in, but download and open the image at screen Android size. While it's still blurry (it's not actually blurry in real life), PacMan pellets 1 pixel big blur into the surrounding lines. Text in the range of 4 X 7 or so pixels is absolutely not legible to the naked eye.

If you are interested, I can help you mock up a python program to do scale testing on your own Iphone/Andriod.

Also, you are free to use any function and logic from my code. There is currently no Ghost AI, as the map area is so small, it doesn't take long before random chance sends the ghosts in your direction. So it seemed unnecessary in such a confined space.
Nearly all the logic is ready for re-use in my code though. I made it to accept different maze patterns, so it will be easy to adapt to any pac-man like maze. However, I do have the maze paths hard-coded to 10 pixels across, as after testing any smaller didn't seem reasonable.

It would be nice if a member of the Tiny Circuits can confirm or deny my to scale findings. Until we developers start receiving our devices, it's really hard to estimate what can be seen on such a tiny high-resolution oled screen.

34

Thumby / Re: Pico Pac - Tiny Pac Man - Finished!

« Last post by CoolieCoolster on November 11, 2021, 02:23:58 AM »

Impressive! I like the full-size Pac-Man on the initial screen. While I also have Pac-Man on my list of games that I think would work well as demakes, its need for several functions I'm not yet sure how to implement convinced me to focus on my simpler ideas first: tracking which pellets to disable (my guess would be a dictionary of all pellet locations, though I wouldn't know how to set that up), ghost AI (having each ghost to go to their designated corners and which pixel each should use as a means of tracking Pac-Man), and how to scroll between bitmaps, among other factors.

As pictured below, I came up with a "NanoMaze" mockup a few weeks ago where the regular Pac-Man maze is scaled down as accurately as possible to a point where only vertical scrolling between two bitmaps would be required. A bit more difficult to give the ghosts "character" with such a low resolution, though as indicated by the "sprite list" at the bottom right, movement direction could be indicated at the very least, with the power pellets differentiated by having them flicker, and swapping the pallet when a power pellet is in effect.

While I plan on implementing my various game mockups in an order of increasing complexity (NanoMaze probably being near the top of the list), if you'd be interested in trying to adapt the logic you came up with for Pico Pac to such a design, or perhaps implementing it as an alternate mode, I'd be glad to divide the graphics into importable sprites and create additional ones as needed. While my attempts at creating functions often take a while just for them to break, once I figure out how to implement saving an array of highscore values to a text file for my current projects, I imagine such a function could be easily repurposed for most games where all that needs to be saved from one session to the next are highscore values.

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Thumby / Pico Pac - Tiny Pac Man - Finished!

« Last post by ccarson81 on November 10, 2021, 09:54:33 PM »

Hey Thumby Community!
I'm happy to share my recently completed game. In Beta until I receive the hardware.
Here is a fully playable Tiny Pac Man like game I made especially for Thumby. I tested it at actual resolution on Andriod and made the controls very forgiving.
Should work at Thumby scale. Anyone with a Thumby, feedback would be appreciated. I don’t own mine yet. Might need to change up speed, optimize memory or the draw pipeline, etc.


Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zITvR0L46c

Also, made a modified version of the emulator here that only plays PicoPac so you can quickly test it out from your browser. Enjoy!
https://christophercarson.github.io/

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TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: Is it broken?

« Last post by jake52 on November 10, 2021, 05:39:14 AM »

No it's not meant for scoring, just to add more bling to the playfield, so as it is currently setup I'm not using the speaker. Pinball modding is quite popular within the community and I did this as a proof of concept to show to others. Ideally a slightly larger display would be more appropriate, but your product helped me show the idea. There are other display modifications used but the flexibility of being able to put what you like on the SD card made your product more appealing.

37

Thumby / Re: Sprite not being completely mirrored?

« Last post by CoolieCoolster on November 09, 2021, 07:40:31 PM »

While it only works with flipping across the x-axis due to how the bitmap data values are ordered, until mirroring is fixed

Code: [Select]

thumby.display.blit(list(reversed(bitmapname)) appears to be a functional alternative that works with the default Python functions.

38

Tiny Arcade & Pocket Arcade / Text/font

« Last post by bkumanchik on November 09, 2021, 03:37:16 PM »

How do I write text to the screen while using the  drawBuffer()   function to draw my sprites?

I've created this function (see below) and tried calling it from several different places in the main loop and from within the  drawBuffer()  function, but it doesn't work

Do I have to draw less of the screen with sprites and reserve the top of my screen for text or can I mix text with sprites?

Thanks,

Brian

void writeText() {
  display.setFont(thinPixel7_10ptFontInfo); 
  display.setCursor(0,0);
  display.fontColor(TS_16b_White,TS_16b_DarkBlue);
  display.print("SCORE:");
}

39

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: Is it broken?

« Last post by lennevia on November 09, 2021, 12:35:50 PM »

Wow, that looks awesome! I am glad the hardware fixed itself somehow.

Is the modification meant to be embedded in the score display or playfield?

Did you attach a different speaker to it? We would love to share your modification on social media if you were open to the idea! Or if you wanted to share it yourself and tag @tinycircuits we could repost whatever you share!

Let me know if you have any other questions and I'd be happy to help advise you on how to get your modification working!

Cheers,
Réna

40

Thumby / Re: Accurate usage of the Thumby.Audio.Play function

« Last post by Jason on November 09, 2021, 10:57:50 AM »

Hi,

It makes sense that you wouldn't hear anything at 100% duty cycle, that's a constant voltage at that point.

Take a look at the plot on this website for an example: https://resources.pcb.cadence.com/blog/2020-pulse-width-modulation-characteristics-and-the-effects-of-frequency-and-duty-cycle

If the duty cycle is 100%, then the voltage in the linked plot would be 5V always, therefore no sound. Also, looking at that plot, the duty cycle does not correlate to volume. During any period, when the signal is HI it is at its max.

If you look at some of our games, like TinyBlocks, you should be able to find examples of using the API that work well: https://github.com/TinyCircuits/tinycircuits.github.io/blob/master/ThumbyGames/Games/TinyBlocks/TinyBlocks.py#L292

Keep in mind that the speaker on the Thumby is also pretty quiet, there really isn't a way to make the sound louder.