ATTINY10 Console Part 1 

Oh BTW please give suggestions on the kind of game to make! Something with a lot of separated verticality would be best, like Space Invaders, Galaga or Breakout.

Realized something last night while taking a leak. Since all the trigger points are even numbers I could divide the line counter by 2 and make it fit inside 1 byte. It would also make double-thick vertical pixels for "free"

Ben: "We saved 4 bytes!" *big party* kids nowadays: "how can you live with only 500 gigs in your PS4?"

It would be pretty cool to fit the whole thing into a yellow RCA plug housing with the knob sticking out the back.

Every major company in 2020: realistic graphics Ben in 2020: crude 8-bit console with more limitations than what the 2600 had

Remember when programmers optimized their code simply because they cared about efficiency? Ooh, I saved 2 bytes* said no one in at least 30 years 😁 Awesome work man.

"Oh man i'm bored lets generate an NTSC signal" - God engineer Ben Heck. What an amazing video. Psyched for more!

10/10 didn't learn anything about programming but i learned more about spaghetti

Just about all of this went over my head but I still find it interesting

"Hey my voice quality changed again...I don't care!" :D

14:54 Even while choking to death, Ben Heck still continous to teach us mere mortals about the legacy of Video signal processing

Ina few years this project will, eventually, run DOOM

The knowledge of this man is incredible. I feel so lucky just to be exposed to that mind...

Oh no, Ben's google profile picture is a picture of his cat. His cat is quickly taking over the house! All jokes aside, great video, thanks Ben!

The good old days when ya built an opamp out of discrete transistors then 30 years later folks r selling them as high end

Love atmel studio. Literally just finished a project in it and 30 seconds later I open your video and you instantly put a smile on my face.

I really got into this micro because of last year's video. I made earrings, a dev board, and a programmer and have been learning assembly as well. Great inspiration for those of us who love building tiny things simply for the challenge. Great content Ben. Keep 'em coming!

Reminds me of this one PIC project back in 1990's where I had to make a subroutine and call it every 6 instructions since the processor lacked an interrupt.

The motivation level that you have given me is really absurdly high! Thank you! There's clearly a lot that you can stuff into 1K

*FunFACT* : The _"vertical front and back porch"_ is actually called _pre-equalisation and post-equalisation_ pulse.

Some extra detail about the garbage in mrs.Pacman on the 2600, the lines on the left of the screen are actually due to how the TIA (the atari's graphics chip) handles horizontal repositioning. The Atari had horizontal repositioning registers for all the major graphics and a separate "HMOVE" register you would strobe to commit the changes. If you didn't strobe the HMOVE at the exact right cycle, it would add that garbage to the left of the screen. If I'm not mistaken, most Atari programmers were unaware you could time it correctly and just assumed the garbage was unavoidable. (or they were like me and too lazy to time it correctly). That's why that garbage is present in most games that move the graphics in the middle of the frame.

The chaotic giggle as you optimise ram usage make this video pure gold

Hey Ben. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed this content, especially the little outro. I'm really looking forward to the next one.

4 bytes of RAM? If it wasn’t for the registers and the clock, we could run this on Ben Eater’s 8-bit computer, with 16 bytes of RAM! Maybe with a RAM and clock upgrade?

I'm halfway down a bottle of cheap vodka and a crazy thought came to me. Imagine if you could give this software to Carol Shaw, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Bob Whitehead and other old Atari developers. Imagine the crazy stuff those dudes could have come up with if they weren't limited to coding assembly. Oh, and awesome video Ben. Thank you.

I really really enjoy using the ATTINY85. I just keep a bunch of them around (both DIP and QFN) since its so cheap and I built my own arduino programmer for them. It's actually a pretty remarkable little chip.

I clicked on this video thinking I'd watch a few minutes to see if it was interesting. Wound up watching the whole thing and am looking forward to the follow-up. Excellent content! Thanks :D

Thank you Ben! Your videos are a wealth of knowledge, and entertainment. Thank you for all you do!

This is super cool. It's like the hardware version of the demoscene. I love minimalism. I also wish I had the EE background to do stuff like this. I feel constrained to software.

Ben, your attitude, talent, and skill is just what we need during these trying times. Thanks for being you.

I'd watch an entire day's worth of this kind of content. Love your comments.

I cant think a world without you Ben. Thank you for years of pure enjoyment.

Ok, wow. Just amazing - explains so well how it all works, and ‘“chasing the beam” in action. Thank you.

This is the perfect Channel to eat cereal to.

I'm just starting the video but these kinds of projects are my absolute favorites to see people make videos on. Gotta say I'm really enjoying where you've been going since Element 14.

i'm never complaining about a chip not having enough pwm outputs ever again

Awesome video!! Looking forward for part 2. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

So far, Paul Carlson (of "Mr Carlson's Lab") is the only person who's managed to get me to consistently click on a video more than an hour long, so you have sympathy. Really cool that an ATTiny10 can do all of this.

I've been WAITING for you to make a video on this chip in a build! This is so cute

I absolutely loved this video and am waiting with baited breath for part 2. I have been playing with the smallest PIC chips for a while to challenge myself to write useful code in very little memory but until seeing this I never even thought about bit banging a video signal. I am very tempted to try this with a microchip pic chip in assembly once I get done with my other projects

Ben writes spaghetti while also eating spaghetti. Seems like a violation of some sort of social taboo. Regardless, it was prime edutainment content!

Cool video and super idea. I can't wait for part two.

I tip my hat to you sir... I understood like 70% of this, but you make it very entertaining. Thanks for all the content you make, I love this channel

Singing "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" while programming live on RU-vid. My kind of twisted. I'm a fan.

Dude, you're one evil genius 😁. Thanks for the share, can't wait for part 2!

An hour long video oh yes!

Dude i barely understand a lot of the stuff you're talking about in this vid but you got a pretty funny personality, you got a good chuckle out of me here and there!

Thanks Ben this was great, looking forward to the continuation. 53 minutes flew by

4:14 It's actually exactly 15750 Hz or 15734 Hz, depending on which era NTSC standard you are going for, but 15700 Hz it never was.

I've been watching Ben's videos since 2013 (when I was 11), It's done a lot to get me through tough times and I've never felt more at home then when I turn a video of his on.

Ah what a great way to start a day , great video man !

This is great, would happily watch three hours of it

That voice quality comment earned my like before I even finished this video. Well played sir.

I love your videos and will continue to watch all of them in hopes to absorb your intelligence

First time I have seen you. Immediately subscribed!

Thanks for showing all the code designing stuff, my favorite part. more please!

Gief part 2 !! So interesting and so fun to watch, I really learned a lot, so I'm wondering what I will learn in part 2. Hope you will do more videos like this after!!

Thanks for this video. I thoroughly enjoyed this... :). Looking forward to part 2

I find it funny, I just spent my afternoon watching the other one and well.. here we go with this one!!

I could watch these videos all day!

To be honest, I look forward to every video on this channel and would totally sit through a feature length film starring that camcorder and a potentiometer. Can't wait for part 2!

1 hour nicely spent...i need the part 2

51:40 "I don't think people will realy want to watch longer than that" I'm personally love long videos on technical topics, when youtuber knows what to do and how to make his audience not get bored. And you are one of them) Thanks for your videos.

It's funny you made this video. I was only just going back over you last one on this and was looking into making my own project using this.

I have no idea what's going on but god DAMN its fascinating.

I admire you a great deal Ben! I hope you're happy and well :)

Dementedly educational. Excellent. Thank you. 👍🏼

50 minutes and it’s only part one? And I’m already somehow 2/3 of the way through? This is some surprisingly engaging content!

I remember doing something similar with a ST62 microcontroller back in 93. In assembly there was barely enough cycles available to check the line counter and take a single byte output action. To make it work I needed to pre-sort and organise the bit actions (along with A/D and other logic works) in the vertical interval. Horizontal stuff was external with physical timers etc.. Cool to see you making a full video signal with that little micro.. can't wait for the complete game ;-)

i had a crazy dream the other day me and my wife came to your house and was taking a kinda tour of your house and all your cool projects and such and playing with that cute kitty + another kitty you had. your house was much bigger and you were kinda hiding out in a back room not wanting to interact lol. idk why but last few months been having crazy dreams only one you made your way into. love your videos hope you never stop

Ben, to keep your code significantly more readable you should use bitfields instead of doing all the math yourself. It allows you to declare the exact number of bits you need for a variable. you do have to stuff them in a struct together though. struct { uint8_t pixelValid:1; uint8_t hSync:1; uint8_t vSync:1;uint16_t lineCount:9 }videoData; for optimization's sake i would also add a uint8_t pad:4 in the middle so the lineCount is aligned at the bottom. This may or may not make a difference depending on your instruction set or your controller but it can. All the single bit variables will generally use single bit compare, set and reset instructions so they are faster that way also. Though to be fair the compiler is likely figuring out what you're doing and using those operators anyways. Neat stuff getting a video signal in that small of a micro :)

Fantastic! I was disappointed when you finished the video at 50 minutes. I was thoroughly engrossed. Now I've had to _hit that subscribe button_ to make sure I don't miss part two.

I just watched the video programming this little chip this morning! What a coincidence 😁

NTSC - Never Twice the Same Colour I was taught :-)

You are an awesome teacher!

Wow, and I thought working with an M0 was cheap and constrained. Lol. Fun video! I'm definitely watching the next one!

cant wait for part 2...cheers.

It just hit me: all the Internet is missing... is a Ben Heck... MOVIE!!! (Picard voice) MAKE IT SO

As my favorite Vulcan would say, "Fascinating!"

This video was worth the watch for the Yars' Revenge reference alone.

That nice in all but don’t let this video distract you that the fact the McRib is back at McDonald’s.

I feel like I learned more from this video than all the "Element 14 Presents" videos in the last year.

Presumably you prefer typing out the register values as 0bXXX or doing it for simplicity, but fwiw the AVR headers define all of the bit names, so you can do stuff like: ADCSRA = (1

What a great project! I love seeing just how much the ATTiny series can do with careful programming. I believe to get completely stable video, you need to put the processor into sleep mode before the end of each line, so it wakes up on the hsync interrupt. Otherwise, it finishes executing the current instruction before servicing the ISR, which takes a variable number of clock cycles.

thumbs up for singing and analyzing The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota! :D

Great stuff! Dabbled with video generation on AT chips myself (ATmega328 and ATtiny84), but that's just an added challenge to make everything work on a 6 pin ATtiny10, good job. For tips on stabilizing the linestarts: 1) Make everything happen in the interrupt regarding drawing, and use the main loop for game logic (you kinda did this already) 2) add a crystal or calibrate the internal oscillator, on my own systems the line stability increased simply by using a crystal instead of the internal oscillator 3) entering an interrupt takes a variable amount of cycles in AVRs. Even if the chip was timed with an extremely precise oscillator, you'd still get line jitter depending on where in main loop your code was when the interrupt was called. It takes anywhere from 2 to 4 cycles to enter an interrupt and you almost no way of knowing how many it took this time. Luckily you are using a timer interrupt, and you know when it triggered, so waiting for a specific TCNT will take the rest of the instability out. Might require some assembly massaging though to make sure the wait/synchronize function ended on the exact same TCNT in every case. I'm sure you already knew this, or at least about this, but in case you didn't, here it is, and in case anyone else is interested in this, here you are.

I have no idea what your'e talking about, but I enjoyed every second

That was beautiful! You could use a range shift for the pot to allow detecting button click at same time as movement btw. Button would shift the pot response from for example 0.5-1.0v up to 1.1-2.2v so there is no overlap thus the motion and button can be consistent and simultaneous.

The enlarged text definitely helps since I watch your content on a TV from a distance!

A Ben Heck video to remind us that you're Ben Heck! Can't wait to finish watching it tomorrow

I've got some attiny45 chips laying around. Gonna have to try this when I get a chance. Good palate cleanser from the 6502 stuff I've been messing with lately. 😁

Love your idea Ben ! 1hour for one of your video is totally ok !

Ooh fantastic! I love microcontroller based gaming content!

This is really neat. Minor point about those black lines in the 2600 Ms Pac-Man. It's a glitch that happens when the sprite fine position adjustment registers in the TIA are updated, because of how the process involves stuffing extra clock pulses into the TIA's state machines. That's why you see those same black lines with the same widths on a bunch of games. The way the TIA was designed you were expected to set the sprite positions once before the screen started drawing, so the glitch wasn't supposed to be visible. But games started updating the position in the middle of the kernel in order to reuse sprites on different scanlines for multiplexing, or for graphical effects where they're wobbled around. Some games would either use a black background to mask the effect (eg Space Invaders) or they'd set those registers every scanline so there was a full black border that didn't stand out (eg a lot of Activision games)

I like how raw is this video

At summer camp we had old computers without internet access or any games besides version 1.1 of Icy Tower. One of us wrote a "grocery shopping" game where you catch fruit falling at increasing speeds until you miss a few. It even had high scores and chipper music.

52:04 Just to prove you wrong i commonly watch 1 hour tech videos hahaha. The knowledge is worth the watch Ben!

finally ! an informative video in youtube !

This is amazing! I was wondering how you'd setup something like this from scratch. Not necessarily the ATTINY10, but a super small basic computer. Not only is this handling game computations, it's also determining how to draw the screen and react to inputs in realtime. That's insane.

Ben if you partially use inline assembly you can use set bit and reset bit. TSB and RSB if I remember correctly, and there should be an instruction for checking a bit(6502 has one). That would significantly save program memory from all that bit shifting. But if I remember correctly you cant pass those instructions values, it has to be a hard coded constant.