I'm thinking about making an AVR (non-Arduino) portable game console. I'm evaluating the type of display to be used (including multiple 8x8 LED matrix, graphical LCD, TFT/OLED screen, alphanumeric LCD and combination of them). Then I came up with a weird idea. What if I use a alphanumeric LCD as a graphical LCD? That'd cut me quite a bit of the cost compared with using graphical LCD of the same physical dimension.
I'm a bit bored today. I feel like tinkering around with Arduino and 1602 LCD that has been around in my home. Here's what I've got as a result of hours of boredom. An Arduino-based 1602 Snake Game:
Check out the source code in this github repository!
The hardware is roughly based on this official Arduino LCD Hello World tutorial, with an addition of two push buttons.
The left push button is connected to D8, while the right push button is connected to D9. Both push buttons are pulled-down. For other connections, please refer to the schematics in the tutorial.
HD44780-compatible LCD driver supports up to 8 custom characters. By carefully defining those 8 characters, it's possible to subdivide each character into multiple "pixels". That can effectively turn the alphanumeric display into a graphical LCD display.
My design subdivides each character two rows. Each row on the character can be either empty, snake, or apple as shown below:
There're two "pixels" in each character. Each pixel can have three possible values. Therefore, the total combination is 3^2 = 9. Since one of these combination is visually empty, a space character were used to represent that. At the end only 8 custom characters are needed. So the 8 available characters in CGRAM of HD44780 are just enough for our purpose.
To reduce RAM usage, each pixel is represented by 2 bits. So a byte can store 4 pixels. Everything is cramped into a uint8_t graphicRam[GRAPHIC_WIDTH*2/8][GRAPHIC_HEIGHT]. At width of 16 and height of 4, only 16 bytes of RAM are taken for the graphic! Had I used a uint8_t for each pixel, 64 bytes of RAM would be required.
After the completion of this project, I've found other designs like spliting each character into three rows, or try making use of all pixels by generating the CGRAM on-the-fly. I'll consider using these techniques for my future projects.
To make the position looks random, we need to somehow seed the random number generator. For computer programs, we usually seed it with the current time of the machine. However, this couldn't be done on Arduino because it doesn't have a real time clock.
My solution is to make a menu screen of the game. When the user start the game, the time of the moment that the user pressed the button is used to seed the random number generator. The micros() method of Arduino Time library were used. This has the equivalent effect of using system time.
I was having fun playing with this game. I thought that it was reasonably bug-free because I had played it for a while. I've also asked one of my family members to try it out. I swear. We haven't spotted any bug.
Until I tried to record a video of the game play, something funny happened. I realized that I haven't implemented self-collision detection of the snake. I was like "Wow. How come no one had notice that earlier?". Hah. What a terrible failure!
Upon the discovery of the bug, it was fixed in no time.
Seems that using alphanumeric LCD as graphical LCD is promising. I'll consider going for this solution for the portable game console project. Of course, I won't be using Arduino for that. Arduino is good for prototyping. But it isn't as efficient as lower-level C/C++ programming.
I've played this game for many times. While it's technically possible to win, I haven't managed to do so. And I haven't tested the code of winning the game. I doubt that anyone could beat it anyway. I guess I'd just leave the code there as it is. :P
Alright. That's enough fun for today. Gotta sleep.
Thank you so much. I tried a lot of other snake games and this is the only one I could get to work.
Sadale