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One feature I'd like: the ability to stop and start the lightwall, like press start or something and it either goes black or all the squares light up white or something. Press it again, it starts up.
Being able to make the lights move in even more directions and stuff would be rad but I'm sure that goes without saying.
could one of the buttons cycle through different shapes? like, right now it's all square but could it change from squares to glitch shapes, to little images, etc?
A pulse button would also be cool. Press it, all squares pulse up to white and back down quickly. You know, for ultimate downbeat seizure time! Hook up a turbo controller and the audience will do involuntary breakdancing on the floor! 
This is a very neato release for something you just hacked together, it's pretty good. I was experimenting using this with music and the numbers are actually pretty cool to use, since you can run the 9-4 during a more smooth/flow portion of a song, switch out to something else, then if you have a heavy break down you can use the big count from 3-0 if it matches. Very very cool to use, especially mixed with some GlitchNES and GalleryNES or LogoNES.
What can I say man, where could you get a software custom-designed to the specs you post in a message board?
Nowhere else I say. This thread is pure magic.
Big ups to Lazerbeat for the original idea and huge thanks to Neil for making it true.
I want to crawl out of my little lurking cave to just say that Neil, I already regard you as something above and beyond but no matter what you always impress me and push things another step. Lovely work and thanks for the idea you put out there and the test videos Lazerbeat - totally awesome.
This is astoundingly positive.
Don Miller and Neil Baldwin, I'm sorry to say, you're not allowed to fly in a plane together. If it crashes, and we lose you both, we might have to get Shigsy to send some of his top designers over to compensate.
Awesome work, I have a few ideas for features which hopefully wouldn't be too outrageous. I will write them up tonight
Would be cool to import images no matter how crude.
a "chaos" button would rule. everything goes apeshit then you hit it again and everything goes back to perfectly structured cubes.
Being able to scramble data/sprites via a sonic & knuckles-type add-on.
Ability to edit text on number scrolling mode, and a consistent speed, would be cool too.
Kinda like scrollNES.
This is already one badass muthaf*dger though. I'll be displaying this on a wall soon.
Last edited by Koatl (Jun 29, 2010 4:20 am)
OK cool. Keep the ideas coming - some good ones so far.
I'm going to try to work on modularising the effects so that colour mode/cycle speed works independently from the movement (I've already done this crudely and you get some neat effects through combinations of animation speed and the speed at which the next colour is fetched from the colour table).
I'll then end up with a library of animation effects which, should make coming up with effect combos a ton easier.
Doing different graphics (apart from the squares) is definitely doable - I did a version with stars already actually just to test it out. Have to figure a way to be able to switch the graphics with minimal screen fuck up though.
Have a full A-Z, 0-9 font now. I didn't realise that my favourite CHR editor (yychr) can work with 1-bit fonts. Makes it a total breeze to add a new font (yourself too!) for the big scroller
Well I'm on board now too, working on the low-level graphics engine only. The version I produced allows a 10x8 grid. I'm trying to figure out whether to reduce it to 8x8, or keep 10x8. Any thoughts? Neil says 8x8 is correct, and I mostly agree, since that's the standard tile size, makes it square, like a big pixel, etc. I just wanted to be sure before I remove low-level support for a larger one. It would simplify things to go to 8x8, but perhaps the widescreen 10x8 is better.
Whoa, blargg - great to see you here!
I personally like the 8x8 size.
Also, Batsly Adams and myself made a dynamic scroll text ROM for the NES a few months ago. Feel free to look at the source if you want to see how we stored and retrieved the character set in ROM. May or may not be useful when trying to figure out how to store patterns and / or text: http://www.no-carrier.com/index.php?/scrollnes/
Last edited by NO CARRIER (Jun 29, 2010 1:30 pm)
I made some screenshots of the current engine, with the two sizes for comparison:
I can widen the squares so that the 8x8 fills the TV, if we decide for sure that 8x8 is the way to go. These also show the larger color palette (currently 256 colors + 16 gray levels), available via some technical tricks.
Hmmm, 10x8 looks better when you see it side by side, I think.