Shades of grey?

[microgamer]

How many grey-scales does the Gamebuino screen have? Or is it just black and white, and the greys have been achieved by rapid onn/off cycles?

[rodot]

The Gamebuino screen only supports 1 bit color : black, or white. Although some will tell you can manage to have an intermediate shade of gray by alternating between black and white at 40FPS, but this flickers, requires accurate contrast adjustment and is really screen dependent so you shouldn't rely on that.

[microgamer]

I'm going to try that on my Microview and see if it works ... it's an OLED screen so it may not - but worth trying as an experiment

Two questions please

1) When will Gamebuinos be available to buy? I thought the crowdfunded 35euros was a very good price given all the components! What price will they be when they are available in your shop?

2) I'm having memory problems (i.e.SRAM shortage) with Microview games that require, any array to store, for example a map. Anything over byte map[48][20] causes it not to work (and that is without anything else going on)
What would be your recommended way of storing an array so it doesn't fill SRAM, but uses the Flash memory instead. I've seen references to the PROGMEM command but not sure how to use it?

[rodot]

1) I can't promise anything by now, but I hope to open an online store before the end of the year. I will try to keep the same price, but maybe the shipping won't be included to allow users to choose either if they want tracking or not.

2) You should take a look at the UFO-Race game I made, it was initially intended as a example for PROGMEM maps.

[erico]

How many grey-scales does the Gamebuino screen have? ...

It depends on the user...Myndale might be able to pull 16 shades of gray and maybe a few colors to boot.

[Skyrunner65]

Color on a monochrome screen?
How is that even possible? The screen can't handle that (unless you're lying, Rodot).
But if he can do 16, that would be quadruple the shades of green that the Game Boy can handle!

[erico]

Skyrunner65, I´m just joking.
It is best to stick with black and white as Rodot stated.

There were some tests about displaying one shade of grey with the technique the original poster stated, but it is quite consuming and it probably may not work on all screens.

I´m sorry if my joke sounded serious, I just meant to say that Myndale is a great coder and can make some unusual things happen, like his last tech demo on wireless transmission.

Sorry again.

[Skyrunner65]

I knew you were joking about that many shades of grey and the colors.
Myndale is the expert on this stuff, how is that?

[microgamer]

Actually there is some truth in your joke, because if you cycle black and white at exactly the right frequency (which vairies from person to person) there is a physiological affect which can give the impression of red and green (google Benham optical illusion for details!)

Anyway I tried greys on Microview and you only get less bright whites, probably because its an OLED.

I want to ask your genius programmer Myndale if maybe he would help me write an emulator for the MicroView - we really need one and would just require slight changes to represent the microview.h include file instead. Do you have a link to your Gamebuino emulator so I can try it?