tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1094715945364929106.post2095932904572615656..comments2024-01-02T12:34:30.507+01:00Comments on Poor Man's Pinball!: SuperMax32 returns!rasmadrakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15811309356939122577noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1094715945364929106.post-83339560572417834652012-05-08T08:44:33.018+02:002012-05-08T08:44:33.018+02:00If I recall correctly I had around 30 shades succe...If I recall correctly I had around 30 shades successfully as long as I only relied on the internal memory of the PIC32 chip.<br />However - the SD card is much slower. So I made the decision to bring the framerate down to a level where the SD card can keep up.<br />With bitpacking I let every pixel have 3 bits (i.e 7 shades + off) and I read every animationframe over 3 display frames (each frame a total of 1536 bytes. <br />So I got around 95-100 Hz refreshrate and animationdata at 30 FPS, which is plenty.<br /><br />If I wouldn't let the SD card decide the speed, the display brightness would drop every time something is read from the SD card, causing annoying "flickering".<br />This is because the display must be fed continuously with new data - even if nothing has changed in it - or else it goes blank.<br />With a FPGA for instance, I could "preload" the FPGA with data and it would continuously draw what's been given to it until told otherwise.<br /><br />7 shades of color + off ("black") is actually a lot of colors when you got only 128x32 to work with and monochrome on top of that. Of course it requires a little creativity with the animations to create depth in the image, but from what I can tell it looks awesome with 7 colors. The old games used 4, remember? :)rasmadrakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15811309356939122577noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1094715945364929106.post-14438625760534763922012-05-08T03:01:37.122+02:002012-05-08T03:01:37.122+02:00with the increase in the lightning of the pixels, ...with the increase in the lightning of the pixels, how many shades do you think you get out of the DMD? I guess using the 80mhz pic32 chip..Stuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03746769788742751281noreply@blogger.com