Several Texas Instruments calculators use a z80 that can go up to 15 megahertz, though I guess that depends on if you consider calculators to be mainstream. They're definitely all over the place in schools though. :p
@@RandomTomatoMusic going from the Gameboy CPU to Z80 is easier than going the other way but the biggest difference is the video hardware that won't be available in the calculator. That being said look at the port of SMB from NES to C64. Different video hardware. So you could adapt. Software sprites.
I played this deo on a Dongfend GB Boy Colour today, using a GB Everdrive. It played pretty well aside from some lines popping on screen (but that is probably due to the GB Boy CPU speed, or the Everdrive, or both). Nice test and nice way to see your demo as well.
This should be "It Came from Planet Sharp". The Gameboy CPU was made by Sharp, not Zilog. That's why it's not compatible with a Z80, and rather somewhere between a Z80 and an 8080 in terms of its instruction set.
0:03 Basic tile based images, everything neat between 8x8 grid. 0:50 It's possible that the spheres are sprites while the UFO is a background object, given you can have 10 8x8 sprites on screen at once per scanline, you could fit more. 1:23 Raycasting using horizontal lines rather than vertical. Logo inside is sprites. 2:14 Multiple sets of tiles used to emulate twisting. 2:19 Horizontal twists made out of background while vertical is made out of sprites. 2:43 Bitmap buffer made out of tiles updated every frame to add another ball. Object is made out of individual 8x8 sprites that are independent. 3:11 3D prisms likely pre-rendered. 8 onscreen using all sprite palettes. Overlapping sprites don't exceed 40 pixels to avoid flicker. 4:04 Same as 1:23, but textured. 4:39 Likely pre-rendered sprites doing the same trick, given the same UFO appears from 0:50. 5:03 Lots of sprites on screen, stay within 10 sprites per scanline. Didn't fool me.
You mean to tell me that demoscene demos use tricks and hacks to make limited hardware seem like it's doing more than what the hardware should be capable of? I'm so shocked and surprised. What a revelation.
I worked on this demo from time to time over a coarse of several years. I don't know what it adds up to. Probably hundreds of hours. That's for the programming alone.
How was this created? What was it coded in? I've heard two rumors, the one is that it is based on html and running on a template, the other rumor was that it's Java. Which is it?
Almost certainly pure Z80 Assembly. GB/C software can also be written in C, however ASM is generally faster and most optimized (this is important, especially for a demo like this).
The real time code (running on the game boy) was written in assembly language. The preprocessing code (image data conversion, lookup tables, etc) was written in Python.
