µGame Turbo is no More

Published on 2018-05-28 in µGame.

After working on research and design for the project-86818 for several months, and after Adafruit has started to work on their own version of a game console for CircuitPython, I decided that the improvements are not really worth the extra price and work, and decided to come back and focus on regular µGame more.

There will be no more hardware iterations (except perhaps a small update changing the USB port to one that is more friendly to the fabricators), but there is still a lot that can be done in firmware and in the libraries. In particular, I have some ideas that I want to try to speed up the screen updates and to make more memory available for the games.

The CircuitPython 3.0 is coming, Beta0 version was just released last week, and I’ve been working a little bit to make sure that all the libraries for µGame work with it. Right now I’m struggling with a change in the API for AudioIO, which makes CircuitPython try to allocate an extra 512 bytes of RAM every time you try to play a sound. Obviously that fails randomly in any larger game, as there is simply no room for it. But I’m sure a solution can be found — in the worst case, I will switch to a different way of making sounds.