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Microvision!

Entry posted by atari2600land December 21, 2020

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All this talk about Microvision (seeing the new screen topic, reading the Microvision Homebrew thread), made me wonder how my Microvision has held up since the last time I played it. So I got out my Microvision from the cold pantry. Had a little trouble putting in the 9V battery that was in the storage part of the battery compartment, but I forced it in and turned it on. Success! My Star Trek: Phaser Strike copy still works.

I updated my Microvision website with info about the world's first Microvision homebrew (a link to the AA thread). I wondered what my idea of a homebrew starring the letter H would look like on a Microvision. So I designed this mock-up:

walkingh.gif.a27ae827419f39c3c4de21fada2df1ab.gif

Not bad. The line in the sky is a cloud. I needed something to tell visually the h is walking forwards instead of just moving his "legs" in place. I don't know whether any of that is actually doable on the Microvision, though. A while back I made a game similar to this on the Odyssey 2 about a lowercase i. Both came from a comic I drew a long time ago about h's invading g-land. So I guess i's will be easier to draw since it's just a vertical line, if they'll appear in this game. I'm going for a Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch type thing here. But I kind of doubt it will ever get past the idea phase. I made the mock-up because I was bored.

The name of my idea is "h". I guess the shortest video game title ever. And I really want Barrage 2021.

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5-11under 3,570

Posted December 24, 2020

One of my goals over the next year is to provide the required elements so that anyone, including yourself, would be able to create their own Microvision game relatively easily.

This would include being able to provide any or all of these:

Printed materials (and templates if you'd rather get them printed yourself):
- Manuals
- Boxes
- Main label
- Keypad overlay
- Bezel
Circuit boards, programmable by the user. Boards would feature an Atmega328, that would be programmed using a fairly cheap EPROM programmer and edge connector (other methods may also become available). There's no emulator for this method (using Atmega328 instead of TMS1100), so at this point a programmer and real Microvision are required to test programs that are made.
Programming guide and sample program(s), for the Arduino IDE, including all basic requirements for the Microvision.
Shells. There's a few options available, but they all come with cost and/or quality limitations. This one will take the most time, and I'm guessing will also have the greatest cost.