The olcPixelGameEngine for Retro Platforms Part I

I’m very found of the Atari 8-bit machines and the Atari ST. When I saw the PixelGameEngine (PGE for the rest of this text) i thought why not port it? I started to look at the Atari ST. Using my own 520 STM as a the target machine.

I soon realised that a regular port wouldn’t cut it. My first attempt was to remove a lot of stuff just to get it to compile. The first PGE binary needed a 4 MB machine. Not even close for my 512kB target machine. In the test program all graphics routines is written from scratch and that is because of the bit plane situation, more on that below.

Before we dig deeper let’s look at the hardware.

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How to attribute/credit/cite the olc::PixelGameEngine

Hello! Firstly a big thank you, the fact that you are reading this means you actually care about doing the right thing, and want to acknowledge the software you have used from other developers.

The olc::PixelGameEngine is open source and is released under the OLC-3 licence. This means you can use it freely, even for commercial projects. However, the licence requires that appropriate attribution is required.

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olc::PixelGameEngine 2.0 is here!

After quite a few late nights, it’s finally here! PGE 2.0 is a significant upgrade on its predecessor, and is 100% backward compatible. This major revision brings in hardware accelerated sprites in the form of the olc::Decal, multiple rendering layers, and has been completely re-organised to make it easy to port to other platforms.

The features added were in response to the fantastic feedback from this community. You guys wanted to use it as a genuine game engine? Now you can.

Download from the Github Repo and try for yourself!