• Controls
    • Use UP/DOWN on the keyboard to select a menu option, then press Enter to select it. (only "Addition" is currently available)
    • The Addition quiz consists of 10 questions for which the correct answers are all 1-9. Press keys 1-9 to respond.
    • Not much else to do in this demo :'(
  • Plan
    • Clone of the math quiz built into Radio Shack's Spell 'n Math Electronic Learning System from the 80's and 90's (Example)
    • This quiz will be the first game implemented for a hardware modification to Leap Frog's modern LeapTop educational computer
    • To aid in development and sharing via itch.io, will also implement a simple emulator (or at least a cross-platform build) to support running games on a dev machine.
  • Status
    • Able to build and run project in a local simulator in an SDL app, as a web simulator via WebAssembly (embedded in this itch.io page), and natively on an ESP8266 microcontroller that is intended to go into the LeapTop.
    • Selected CImg.h as a cross-platform image/font library, but lost a significant amount of time debugging its font functionality. It appears to use too much memory to fit into the microcontroller's RAM. I decided too late that I will have to replace it with a simple font tile set, and then ran into issues setting up the correct embedded data (uncompressed grayscale array in program memory) with the tools I had on-hand.
    • The ESP8266 version of the project can output to a 64x32 internal frame buffer, but the font is not available and the result is only viewable in a serial terminal.
    • After disassembling the actual LeapTop device, I found that the display is most likely directly attached to its processor, which makes it challenging to hack in the microcontroller. Similar devices are 6502-based and have a discrete flash ROM chip, so it may be possible to reprogram the 6502 to pass the frame buffer data to the display. If not, the entire display could be replaced with one more suitable for the ESP8266.
    • The addition game was quickly thrown together using CImg.h's font as a proof-of-concept. "Scrolling" was intended to be a proof-of-concept for how 2D tile map graphics can be displayed within a 64x32 viewport.
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