Engin Cilasun

Sandpiper is now stable.
It's a mini Linux console which has some small hardware to aid in retro-ish game development.
It even has dual image plane compositing!
Check it out here:

ecilasun.github.io/sandpiper/

And once again, all emulators (MacOS/Windows/Linux) are updated to match.
Details here:

ecilasun.github.io/sandpiper/

Added dual image layers to sandpiper. It can composite 16bpp(rgb) or 8bpp(indexed) color buffers or use a mask color to output a single image. Handy when you don’t want to update UI layer often, or at a different frame rate.

Chargers. Always chargers.

Now that I've wrapped up sandpiper, it's time to start planning for The Next Thing.

I just need to drop gdbserver on the OS disk image and it should be good to go.

well since I've upgraded to better devices, the emulator should be running more difficult stuff now.
here it is emulating the copper chip and also quake over the sandpiper video device.

Fixed the emulator for sandpiper so that usb keyboard entry also works, so it’s a complete little machine now.
Will add gdb server to the OS image and it’ll be all ready for development :)

Worked on sandpiper a bit this week.
It now loads USB drivers in the emulator, so now we have keyboard entry working as the real device.

Have a look!
ecilasun.github.io/sandpiper/

What sword?

Five years. And finally the legendary sword drops :) (don’t worry there is a tip protector installed so I’m not making holes on the ground)

Recursion is just a couple of trench coats in a trench coat.

Probably the best day to port my DX12 engine to Metal and Vulkan.

Welp. This rotation is wrapped. See you in the next one.

Neat! Do you do any depth or ray octant based sorting while tracing?

Congratulations! I'm starting to work on this myself, only at 10 pounds so far. But progress feels so good :)

Oh so you haven’t reached the point where timing closure comes out of nowhere to knock the Lego pieces down 😆

It is now safe to power off - sandpiper

ecilasun.github.io/sandpiper

Ants found a way into our floor. White vinegar, citric acid powder and alchemy time.

If you happen to have one of these smart zynq boards sitting around doing nothing:
www.hellofpga.com/index.php/20...

I recommend you give this a go to convert it to a fun little console with video, audio and a video coprocessor unit:

ecilasun.github.io/sandpiper/

I could say the same about publicly available graphics code / shaders all being horrible (like RTL)
The models are not doing any favors by spreading around that garbage.

Hello :) I’ve moved to California, it’s been going well so far. How about you?

Too late for me. Run save yourself oh wait…

Of course, needless to say, the real hardware is _way_ smoother than the emulation but the emulator does a pretty good job of approximating it well enough.

Here you can actually see a bug. When I run the 'play' sample the VCP program wasn't terminated so it keeps running on the VCP unit, simultaneously with the CPU :D

The devices the emulator can imitate at the moment:
- VPU (Video processing unit, all video modes)
- PAL (Color palette unit)
- APU (Audio unit)
- VCP (copper unit and its CPU)
It has internet access via QEMU's built in network device emulation and runs Petalinux (I wish I had time for a custom OS)

Here's the sandpiper emulator, running all hardware and software that the real hardware can.
Kudos to QEMU for making this so easy. Adding custom devices was a breeze.
Head over to ecilasun.github.io/sandpiper/ and check it out!
(OS .img is very large but I'll find a way to distribute a copy)

Well that went quite well. Got audio and VPU (including all video modes) up and running. VCP is going to give me a bit of a headache due to pixel timing but we'll get there.
Since it's QEMU network works out of the box but USB keyboard doesn't. We'll get to that after all's done.

sandpiper is getting a QEMU system soon. It can already boot and run the operating system and run quake as a test, I'm working on more devices at the moment.