PiFox

Video of the game in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5n9IxSQH1M

Developed as an extension to a first year group project at Imperial College London.

Bare Metal 3D rail shooter game

• 5800 lines of ARM assembly (ARMv6 + VFP1)
• Software rasterizer
• 3D objects
• 2D billboards
• Sound using DMA
• NES controller input
• Math & utility library
• GitHub: https://github.com/ICTeam28/PiFox
• Emulator: https://github.com/ICTeam28/PiEmu

Dependencies

Using your favourite Linux package manager, install:

• arm-none-eabi-binutils
• cmake

Build

The project uses CMake and requires an ARM assembler supporting GNU as syntax.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Emulation

PiEmu (https://github.com/ICTeam28/PiEmu) can run the game without sound. Assuming PiFox and PiEmu have been cloned in the same directory and both are built, PiEmu must be invoked with the following command inside PiFox's build directory:

../../PiEmu/build/piemu --graphics --quiet --memory=256M --addr=65536 --nes kernel.img 

A qemu branch can be used to emulate the game at a higher framerate, but sound must be disabled. (https://github.com/Torlus/qemu/tree/rpi)

config.txt

In order to be compatible with qemu, the kernel must be loaded at address 0x10000.

disable_overscan=1
disable_pvt=1
force_turbo=1
gpu_mem_256=160
gpu_mem_512=316
cma_lwm=16
cma_hwm=32
kernel_address=65536

Wiring the controller

Authors

Nandor Licker

• Email: nandor.licker13[at]imperial.ac.uk
• Github @nandor

Ilija Radosavovic

• Email: ilija.radosavovic13[at]imperial.ac.uk
• Github @ir413

David Avedissian

• Email: david.avedissian13[at]imperial.ac.uk
• Github @davedissian
• Twitter @davedissian

Nic Prettejohn

• Email: nicolas.prettejohn13[at]imperial.ac.uk
• Github @nkp
• Twitter @thisisnkp

Special thanks

• https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi
• https://github.com/PeterLemon/RaspberryPi

Special thanks to chpatrick (Patrick Chilton) for his advice.