Building the BE was my first attempt at putting a kit together, and I have to say, I'm hooked! I definitely had a lot of trouble with that video chip, with lots of bridging or poor contacts that had to be fixed, and at one point I had to hot air the chip off the board to carefully fix some pins that had been bent and soldered together. It worked out in the end though, and now I have a fully working board. The instructions for flashing on the build page weren't really detailed enough for a complete noob like me because I didn't know which wires to connect and the commands seem to no longer apply to the most recent version of the tool, but a thread in this forum helped a lot.
If I can wrap my head around Fusion 360, my plan for this board is to fit it into a 3d printed case with a lovely donor mechanical keyboard that I happen to have going spare.
After I got it all working, I quickly whipped up this naive mandelbrot rendering program:
1 colsalt=RND(1)255
2 xoffset=(RND(0)3)
3 yoffset=(RND(0)2)-1
4 scale=RND(0)RND(0)
10 FOR yp=0 TO PSIZE(1)
20 FOR xp=0 TO PSIZE(0)
30 x=0
40 y=0
50 x0=((xp/PSIZE(0))scale)-0.5+xoffset
60 y0=((yp/PSIZE(1))scale)-0.5+yoffset
70 iteration=0
80 maxiteration=100
90 WHILE xx+yy<=(22) AND iteration<maxiteration
100 xtemp=xx-yy+x0
110 y=2x*y+y0
120 x=xtemp
130 iteration=iteration+1
140 WEND
150 IF iteration<>maxiteration THEN c=iteration ELSE c=0
160 PSET xp,yp,c+colsalt MOD 255
170 NEXT
180 NEXT
200 GOTO 1
One problem I encountered was with the classic BASIC maze drawing program:
10 IF RND(0)>0.5 THEN PRINT "/"; ELSE PRINT "\";
20 WAIT 10
30 GOTO 10
I left this running for a few hours while I was doing other things and came back to find that it had stopped adding new characters. It hadn't crashed, it's just like it reached the limit of the amount it could print.
