CircuitPython 4.0 and Display Support

Published on 2019-04-12 in µGame.

The upcoming CircuitPython 4.0 introduces, among other things, built- in support for displays. That means that when there is an error in your code, you will be able to see it right there on the screen, without having to connect to some gnarly serial ports. For now the built-in display code is slow — fast enough for displaying text, but not for games. So I went and modified my Stage, a Tile and Sprite Engine  library to coexist with the displayio support, to get the best of both world — console using displayio, and fast updates using stage.

There are still some tweaks left to do, perhaps use of a smaller font, and I still need to resolve the audioio problems that appeared with CircuitPython 3.0, but there are already nice improvements.

I also hope to see if I can use DMA to speed up display updates considerably.