ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Sep 09, 2015 3:45 pm #28742 Using canvas objects and generating some real graphics would be really neat! I've been reading up on the VIC-II chip and RAM layouw and I think extracting the relevant info and getting it to the web-client shouldn't be that difficult. (Never used ajax however)

Another avenue would be using a secondary esp8266 (connected via tx/rx fast enough?) to increase the video possibilities via a webpage or directly via vga even. (Since it is possible to achieve 160x200 color vga on a 16Mhz arduino uno, it could be possible on an esp, but I am still investigating this angle.)

My personal goal is a homebrew 8 bit computer as much like a C64 as possible, including graphics (offering only the most used C64 graphics modes however) and sound using a couple of esp8266 chips (cheap and fast) and only if not possible using avr chips for parts of the project .

A section on this site would be great for me and others to post about PET based projects based upon esp8266!

- Wed Sep 09, 2015 6:34 pm #28755 It occurred to me this morning that if you could fit it into one module and connect to it via a web page you could use an -01 and put it inside one of these: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:150957 Then you'd have a fully functional C64 on a keychain. Kinda. One of my day jobs is doing this sort of web coding, if you're looking for help, I can try to give the http console a shot.

Speaking of retrocomputing, the problem that I signed up for ( a telnet chat system) is designed after software that originally ran on an Apple iie. viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5456&p=28678#p28678

- Thu Sep 10, 2015 12:18 am #28762 As I understand a lot of games were made using the character graphics mode in which chars were redefined and used for gaming maps and combined with sprites to make a game. The data amount per frame should be limited (but this is only my understanding , hope I'm right). The remaining issue could be latency. Is the esp8266 in combination with html/ajax fast enough for say 24 frames/second? (That's movie frame rate isn't it.)

- Thu Sep 10, 2015 3:57 am #28772 Thinking about that: what if we could just shove changes to screen and color RAM unchanged to the browser, and implement that part of the C64 emulator in the browser? Could pull bits from MESS for that part.

Ultimately, probably want to do it both ways, so could also hook up a second MCU with screen and keyboard on it.

As far as latency goes, I imagine it would depend on the network and RF environment. For the best, you'd probably want to run the mcu in APSTA. But I do think a lot of games would be playable.