pkiller

Thanks :)

The only multi-input game I have right now is Tetris for 2 players. My girlfriend doesn't complaint while playing it (except when I win :P), so I'd say it's pretty responsive, even with the somewhat convoluted way the CPU communicates with the PPU and the double-buffering.

I think it will work for other types of games as well. With all the hardware, firmware for the 3 microcontrollers, bootloader software, compiler toolchain and tools, I still haven't gotten around to actually make a lot of games for it.

Thanks :)

Well nowadays there's a lot of material online, I did find a book interesting, though: "Make: Electronics", it teaches the basics in a very nice way.

Aside from that the key, I guess, is to start small and incrementally go for more and more complex stuff going towards things you like (video games, robotics, etc). If you consistently achieve small victories I think it's enough to stay motivated. Everytime I managed to overcome something, I took it as a victory (generating the video signal, getting a program to run on the CPU, etc) and this helped me get to the next problem to solve.

I started with discrete logic and an Arduino, went on to programming microncontrollers similar to the one on the Arduino and moved from there to CPUs, RAMs, FPGAs, etc.

Also Youtube channels like EEVblog and GreatScott! are great learning resources.

Thanks a lot :)

It really is super satisfying to get this far, I still turn it on sometimes just to check if it really works.

And I also had zero experience with electronics (and I still don't know as much as I should...), so yeah I think you could piece together something like this. :)

It's my understanding, that the reason why arcade boards were so much more powerful was because they were a lot more complex thus much more expensive to design, source components and produce in large scale.

More colors, background layers and sprites with slow CPUs and graphics chips in the 80s usually meant having several RAM chips to have multiple memory buses and parallel accesses to video memory and more video memory in KB. That's why arcade boards were usually very large and with a lot more components when compared to home computers and home video game consoles.

Sprite scaling was added to Sega's 16-bit console with the Mega CD, it probably wasn't included with the original console so Sega could beat the competition and launch it at a competitive price in 1988 before Nintendo could launch its 16-bit console.