blu / game-and-watch-base

Game & Watch Screen Tests

Game-and-Watch Screen Tests

A set of performance tests for the LCD screens of the 2020-and-later Game & Watch mario and zelda handhelds. Goal is to have a tool for evaluating the pixel-switching latencies among primary colors. When high, such latencies usually produce characteristic ghosting effects during quick animation sequences. A phenomenon users of the 1st-gen PSP are too familiar with during 60fps animations.

What Does It Look Like?

How to Build

This project relies on open-ocd patched for accessing the full size of the STM32H7B0VBTx internal flash banks; see this patch by Konrad Beckmann and the corresponding helper project for getting open-ocd built on Ubuntu and MacOS. Note that while open-ocd is built natively for the deploying host using a native toolchain, a cross-compiler cortex-m7 GNU toolchain is also required, which is beyond our scope.

Once a cortex-m7 toolchain and a patched open-ocd are provided, carry out this STM32CubeH7 gist section to provide a suitable STM32H7 HAL. Finally, to produce an optimized build:

$ git clone https://github.com/blu/game-and-watch-base.git
$ cd game-and-watch-base
$ ln -s $STM32CubeH7/Drivers
$ make DEBUG=0 flash
# or if building RAM ELF
$ make DEBUG=0 ram

Usage

`D-Pad` -- select one of cyan-on-red, magenta-on-green, yellow-on-blue or white-on-black color combinations; not all tests feature all combinations, e.g. Blue-Turtle-shell is just blue
`A` -- next test
`B` -- prev test
`PAUSE` -- pause/unpause animation
`TIME` -- select animation speed 1x/2x/4x
`GAME` -- select next model in the mesh tests