WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 7926004

Bare Metal Assembly Raspberry Pi Starfox Tribute

139 points| thisisnkp | 11 years ago |youtube.com

36 comments

order

userbinator|11 years ago

Great work, it's always nice to see more Asm projects!

"Bare Metal" - does this mean the RPi can run blob-free?

A possible improvement I suggest is to gfx_draw_line in gfx.s - using a fixed-point algorithm could be simpler and faster: http://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/faster-than-bresenhams-...

pjc50|11 years ago

That depends on what you mean by "blob free"; this code doesn't use the GPU other than to setup the frame buffer. From then on it's software 3D.

lnandor|11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

Even though the game does not need an operating system, it still requires bootcode.bin and start.elf.

The fixed point version of Bresenham's algorithm looks really nice on x86, but it uses integer division, so implementing it on an ARMv6 (no div instruction) would be quite painful.

samwilliams|11 years ago

This is extremely impressive - well done all!

There is a bare metal chess game [0] for the Pi that was presumably another teams entry for the same assignment (they are both from Imperial).

[0] https://github.com/xu-ji/assembly_chess/

lukegb|11 years ago

Yes, it looks like it - they would have completed the assignment last year.

retroencabulato|11 years ago

I'm impressed first year students can write such clean assembly. Also that they can write both driver code and a higher level rasterizer.

pjmlp|11 years ago

Why so? I was already looking at Assembly listing at the age of 12.

When I was 16, I enjoyed using higher level languages but the real fun was doing Assembly.

Kids these days real need to get some of this exploratory desire back.

xupybd|11 years ago

Yeah clearly not your average first year.

kator|11 years ago

Wow that brings back memories of building games on a TRS-80 Model I in z80 assembly!

Good show, I've often felt low level was a dying art, perhaps I'm wrong and stuff like this will push people to learn what a register is and what "flags" are.. :-)

marcosscriven|11 years ago

Very impressive. How things have changed - we did nothing quite so fun and practical in first year computing at Imperial back in 1995! Plus, now I feel old :)

JamesAn|11 years ago

A welcome return to the Acorn/RISC OS days where "100% ARM assembler" was a back-of-the-box boast for many games and applications (Sibelius).

pjmlp|11 years ago

Not only Acorn/RISC OS, but all 8 and 16 bit home systems.

The main issue is of course portability, but I had lots of fun with Assembly during that timeframe.

Do you know how RISC OS fares in the Raspberry PI?

slipstream-|11 years ago

Oh wow. This is awesome.

And here I am sitting here, with little x86 asm and z80 asm knowledge, reversing windows binaries and messing with Pokémon arbitrary code execution exploits. (optimizing my payloads for the 8F/"ws m" exploit is fun though!)

Been meaning to learn ARM asm for some time, but haven't got around to it.

voltagex_|11 years ago

Looks like there's a tiny little emulator for this, too.

https://github.com/ICTeam28/PiEmu

I've got as far as installing the SDL headers (you're looking for SDL.h from SDL 1.2) and running cmake . but not much further.

lnandor|11 years ago

Hello,

I have added a more informative README and fixed a couple of issues that prevented the game from running. In case you need any more help, could we move this discussion to GitHub issues?

serialvelocity|11 years ago

Hey, I'm part of the team who wrote this. What platform are you running on? and what errors are you getting?

lukegb|11 years ago

I have to say, this assignment in general has been my favourite part of first year (my group extended our assembler to look enough like GNU as that we could assemble the output of GCC, so we could compile CSUD).

Nice work - love it (might play it at some point to see if I'm any good).

voltagex_|11 years ago

Looking at this project, I feel very very very dumb. I've been using computers for 2 decades and programming for 1 and I can't even imagine doing something like this!

BenDaglish|11 years ago

Reading this comment made me very very sad. I've been programming computers for over 3 decades, and this is how we started off in my day. The "MyComputerification" of IT education during the 90's has a lot to answer for...

parley|11 years ago

Nicely done! I remember getting the original game for Christmas one year as a kid, and it was lots of fun. This brings back memories. Kudos!