XGS Pic 16-bit Game Development Kit

The new XGS kits by Nurve Networks are under the XGameStation brand. This kit is powered by the Microchip Pic24 microcontroller which was mostly headed by Josh Hintze, with most of documentation and example programs written by him. Like the Hydra kit, they were looking for demo programmers to write programs that would showcase the hardware.

This time around I desided to write a graphics driver that was more capable than the one that was provided. I figured that a good addition to the game kit would be a graphics driver that could display more sprites that are bigger, as well as 4 way scrolling. The graphics driver that I wrote gives the system the look and feel of a video game console, with ease to the programmers.

A nice feature of the Microchip Pic24 microcontroller is that it can be programmed in C. To save myself some time I created an XGS simulator, where I can program XGS software away from the unit itself. For the simulator I created a wrapper that simulated the graphics functions of the graphics driver I wrote, and uses SDL for the display. This made programming a lot easier since I could run the code on the PC, then when I was happy with it, drop the C code in the XGS programming environment, compile, and download.

Below are the demo programs that I created for the 16-bit XGS system, and the final product at the online at Nurve Networks.

Micro Valley Racer

After making more modifications to my graphics driver to add scrolling and multiple windows (using a display list that can control each scanline), I wanted to create a game that showed off these features. This time I desided to create an original game where you race against the clock for the highest score.
NTSC version: Download XGS binary image and source

XGS Pac

With the new graphics driver, there weren't any games running on it, so I desided to write a Pacman clone to show it off. The bug in the video where the ghost is getting stuck in the tunnel has been fixed.
NTSC version:Download XGS binary image and source
VGA version:Download XGS binary image and source

XGS Graphics Demo
I used this program to just briefly show off the capabilities of the graphics driver that I wrote. The background rotates in the circle with the 8 sprites bouncing up and down.
NTSC version:Download XGS binary image and source

Bowling
This was my first program on the XGS 16-bit Pic system. This was a simple game that I created to learn the tools and the system itself.
NTSC version:Download XGS source

	Micro Valley Racer After making more modifications to my graphics driver to add scrolling and multiple windows (using a display list that can control each scanline), I wanted to create a game that showed off these features. This time I desided to create an original game where you race against the clock for the highest score. NTSC version: Download XGS binary image and source
	XGS Pac With the new graphics driver, there weren't any games running on it, so I desided to write a Pacman clone to show it off. The bug in the video where the ghost is getting stuck in the tunnel has been fixed. NTSC version:Download XGS binary image and source VGA version:Download XGS binary image and source
	XGS Graphics Demo I used this program to just briefly show off the capabilities of the graphics driver that I wrote. The background rotates in the circle with the 8 sprites bouncing up and down. NTSC version:Download XGS binary image and source
	Bowling This was my first program on the XGS 16-bit Pic system. This was a simple game that I created to learn the tools and the system itself. NTSC version:Download XGS source