Sik wrote:
I guess that compiler is useful by now :v
It's been useful (or usable?) for a while now. "While" depending on what you want/need. Mac OS X support is recent and so is float support in scanf() and strtod(). Unreal mode support has been there for a year. Proper preprocessor (ucpp) has been included for about a year and a half. Floats were added two years ago. DPMI support is even older. Linux and Windows support were added three years ago. MIPS support (in RetroBSD) is some four years old.
Sik wrote:
For those trying to figure out the relevant specs (since trying to sort it out from the PIC32 specs along side everything else can be somewhat confusing):
- MIPS at 50MHz
- 256KB ROM
- 64KB RAM
- Both text and graphics mode
- Graphics mode is 256×224 4bpp
- Audio playback seems to use DMA
Graphics mode eats up nearly half the RAM though (which means no double buffering hence why the screen flickers badly in the second video).
Yeah, graphics without dedicated on-display memory is expensive. Especially on this lower-end chip. RetroBSD runs on a chip with 128KB RAM, 512KB Flash at 80MHz.
Sik wrote:
The microcontroller can come in several speeds so I had to look up at the pic to see the exact model in use. The speed certainly makes software rendering easy enough, though I guess the memory limit is still a pain.
There are better MIPS microcontrollers. Like the PIC32MZ series with up to 512KB RAM running at 200 MHz (also has an FPU, can have external memory and much more).