Let’s discuss Agon Light


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robert.rozee
Guru

Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 2378
Posted: 10:57am 28 May 2023      

  Mixtel90 said  I know nothing of the SWD port other than that it has connections. :)
Whether it could ever be of any use other than for low level programming and debugging
access I've no idea.


the SWD port can be used to read and write areas of RAM in a way that is transparent to
the CPU cores. so yes, it "has connections". all relatively well documented.

  Mixtel90 said  I can't see the point in using an external video display chip to act as
a VT100 graphics display. Pointless for graphic gaming. Ok if you want bus station sign
boards, I suppose. :) You may as well stick with the current display capabilities of the
PicoMite.


VT100 is fine for passing text data back and forth. in graphics mode (games), you can
use whatever protocol works for you... the SWD port is fast enough that it would not be
significantly different talking to any modern graphics card with onboard GPUs. people
seem to use sprites quite a fair bit with the likes of the VGA PICO running MMbasic. in
that case, you'd be sending the sprite bitmaps over to the video PICO once at the start
of your game, then telling it where and how to move those sprites as the game
progressed. different demarcation line, but essentially much the same.

just as an MMbasic program contains simple commands to perform graphic functions, so a
dual PICO arrangement would see the MMbasic interpreter sending simple commands over to
the video PICO.


cheers,
rob   :-)
Edited 2023-05-28 20:59 by robert.rozee