This fully funded Kickstarter project will commercialize the "Gameduino" -- an Arduino shield optimized for creating old-school, 8-bit video-games, pre-loaded with numerous sprites and set up for easy connection to a VGA display. The project's leads say their mission is to bring the glory of 8-bit gaming to the deprived youth of today who have to get by with 32-bit consoles and multi-million-player MMOs.
Gameduino: an Arduino game adapter
(Thanks, JamesBowman, via Submitterator!)
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The 32 bit console era has long since past :P
@toasty mofo: Actually, many PCs are still 32 bit. Most XP installs are 32 bit, and we’re only now making the brave transition to 64 bit processors. (http://xkcd.com/607/)
This is what the author is talking about. I don’t think there are any 64 bit consoles, currently. They’re all 32 bit. The Jaguar and N64 were just attempts to dazzle people with big numbers when people didn’t know the difference in a 16-bit or a 32-bit or a 64-bit processor.
@Eric Z Goodnight: Generally, the term is used to denote the number of bits processed by the GPU, not the CPU. The Geneses and SNES both had 16-bit processors, the PSX and Saturn 32-bit, and the Nintendo 64 had a (you guessed it) 64-bit.
The last round of consoles were 128 (DC, PS2, XBox, GC), but the rubric lost meaning soon after that, as the systems became much more complex. Much like the true Gigahertz of a modern day CPU no longer means as much as it used to, with dual core, quad core, etc., CPUs…
Funny; I go the other way. I consider the PC Engine an 8-bit system, even with a 16-bit GPU.
And while we’re nitpicking, isn’t “multi-million player MMO” a bit redundant? Is the “massive” part of MMO really not enough anymore?
Also, when did we start lopping off the RPG? While MMO sounds/types fine, expanding it to Massively Multiplayer Online…. online what? Fishing?
“isn’t “multi-million player MMO” a bit redundant?”
Actually, no. The “massive multiplayer” bit refers to the number of people who can play together simultaneously. A (non-Massive) multiplayer game may only allow eight people to play together, but an MMO can over a thousand players sharing the same server at the same time (or, in the case of Eve Online, over 45,000 players simultaneously sharing a game-world). Whether it’s actually popular enough to have that many players is another issue entirely – very few MMOs actually have millions of players.
Just by the way, in case anyone else was confused by the word “shield,” they mean “add-on board.”
The Arduino folks are apparently infested by that curious technological malady that requires that they invent jargon not only for genuinely new concepts, but for existing ones as well, and then decline to explain these for maximum opacity. A definition for “shield” conspicuously fails to appear on the Getting Started, Learning, or FAQ pages on the official Arduino site, ensuring that you can understand what they’re talking about only if you already understand what they’re talking about.
You can find a definition on their Wiki, in which case you discover that it is an add-on board, but you still will not know what the add-on board shields, nor what it shields whatever-it-shields from.
Thank you!!!
I had gathered from the post title that 8-bit games were somehow under assault by some sort of… something.
For makers that want to do this now, get the Hydra Game Development kit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HYDRA_Game_Development_Kit
It comes with the Parallax Propeller chip, VGA converters, etc. Everything you need to get started today.
Price is a little more than the combo Arduino, shield, joystick combination. But it exist today and you can write in Basic, C or Forth.
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/PropellerKits/tabid/144/ProductID/467/List/1/Default.aspx?SortField=ProductName,ProductName