Gameduino 3X: incremental improvements

This week I've made some improvements to the GD library - the software layer that drives the Gameduino 2, 3 and 3X.

The latest version is 1.1.1, and is available here.

GD3X/BT815 support in the asset converter

The asset converter is now supports more GD3X features. Many of the new registers, commands and bitmap formats are supported in the Python bindings.

Running on a PC with SPIDriver

The GD library now can now run all the examples on a PC with a SPIDriver. This is a big help for me, because it's much faster to develop and test on a regular PC than on an Arduino. If you attach a SPIDriver to your Gameduino 3 or 3X, all the examples should build and run, talking to the Gameduino over USB. The source is all here.

Better fault reporting on GD3X

With GD3X, the graphics are handled by the BT815, itself an incremental improvement on the FT810. One of these improvements is easy to overlook. When BT815 detects an error in the command stream (like an illegal option, or trying to draw a gauge with zero radius) it halts, flags an error, and provides a human-readable string describing the cause. The previous chips didn't provide any clue about what had gone wrong. Now when the GD library detects a hardware trap, it can show a slightly more informative crash screen. It's not perfect -- you still don't know which call to cmd_text() caused the fault, but it definitely eliminates some of the guesswork.


Thanks for reading.