I've been thinking more about the fantasy console I want to make, been doing a lot of reading and done some prototyping. I think it's going to be quite inspired by the Atari ST, with influences from the Amiga and the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, and even Capcom arcade systems. - ThreadSky

mattiasg.bsky.social • 15 days ago

I've been thinking more about the fantasy console I want to make, been doing a lot of reading and done some prototyping. I think it's going to be quite inspired by the Atari ST, with influences from the Amiga and the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, and even Capcom arcade systems.

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mattiasg.bsky.social•15 days ago

I want to emulate a CPU which is inspired by, but not identical to, the Motorola 68000. But faster, maybe like up to 4 times faster? I want more memory than you typically had in an Atari ST or Amiga, like maybe 4MB?

mattiasg.bsky.social•15 days ago

For graphics, I'm leaning towards 12-bit colorspace (R, G,B each goes from 0-15), with a 16 color palette. But considering having like 4 palettes active at a time, and 4 independent pixel layers, each using one palette, for 64 simultaneous color. Tile rendering, hardware sprites

mattiasg.bsky.social•15 days ago

For sound, I'm going to want a few channels for playing PCM samples, say 4 of them? maybe with adpcm compression. But also some sort of PSG or emulated sound chip, something that can synthesize some nice instrument sounds. Leaning more towards subtractive synth than FM synthesis

mattiasg.bsky.social•15 days ago

This is going to be a fairly large project and it's going to take some time. But I'm going to be sharing it as I go along, and maybe once I start picking up speed, others will join in as well - I would welcome that, I feel quite ready to do something more collaborative )

mattiasg.bsky.social•15 days ago

Oh, and I also wanted to add, this is going to be a totally free and open source (public domain) thing, running on win/linux/mac and browser.

I'm also hoping it could serve as a starting point for anyone wanting to make their own fantasy console with other limitations.

mattiasg.bsky.social•15 days ago

If you want to get involved or just follow what's happening, I have a discord here: https://discord.gg/ZVuX2pwS24 (originally for my Yarnspin engine, but I am widening its purpose). Or you can just write me and follow me on here :)

jakeworrell.bsky.social•14 days ago

I've always felt there was room for a fantasy console core for the MiSTer FPGA system. If you built something that was pretty authentic in terms of hardware components, it might be possible for somebody to also create an FPGA core...

kaofelix.dev•14 days ago

This is fantastic, thanks for sharing! I joined the discord and will be following closely. I recently thought about doing some kind of fantasy console as well, but I have short time and too many itches, so getting to see this from the start will be amazing, maybe some day I can contribute too

mattiasg.bsky.social•14 days ago

Thanks for joining :) and feel to contribute anyway you like - there's no comittment, and contributing ideas or opinions is just as valid (as is just following along) :)

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