About Hybrix

Programs worth understanding

Chombit Chess was made using Hybrix Studio. The source code is on GitHub.

The gallery has more demo ROMs, from games to tools and music:

Made using Studio's editors

Quickly create sprite animations, tilemaps, and music using Studio's built-in editors, then arrange them into scenes on a board.

Emitted Definition

s_door {
  door_id: 1,
  clip_shut: @id_clip_door3_shut,
  x: 13,
  y: 34,
  flip_x: true,
  clip_open: @id_clip_door3_open,
  direction: 3,
  room_item_kind: 1,
  room: @l_1002,
  destination: @l_1005
} at @l_1006

Compiled into CPU instructions you can follow

Write code using the Hybrix language, a minimalist programming language with familiar features like classes, generics, and memory safety, without giving up direct access to the hardware. One click in Studio reveals the CPU instructions produced from the line you're editing, highlighted side-by-side:

index <- to_byte(index + 1)
if index >= 16
 
 
do index <- 0

c0_10a5: 88 15 01   add b:21, 1
c0_10a8: 95 15 10   compare b:21, 16
c0_10ab: 08         if less unsigned
c0_10ac: 3c 05      jump near $c0_10b1
c0_10ae: 40 15 00   move b:21, 0

b:21 is the CPU register for the variable index.

Built on a framework you can read

Newly created projects come with a ready-made game engine, text console, and sound player to help you get started quickly. The framework is open source, so you can learn from it, modify it, or replace it with your own inventions. Studio even shows you the assembly code for the garbage collector that manages memory.

Running on the Chombit CPU

In Studio's debugger, you can step through your program, watch the CPU's registers change, and see how many cycles each line takes. The instruction set has 25 instructions, each with a documented machine code and cycle cost, budgeted from 200,000 cycles per video frame.

The CPU tab: conventional registers at the top, the current function's framed registers below.

Controlling chips and devices

Your program controls the hardware by storing numbers in memory: store $16 at $d0_0300, and the background turns purple. Even music works this way: an instrument is 222 bytes in memory, and your program queues events that tell the Jamdac synthesizer when to play each note.

         # background color
d0_0300: 15
         # sprite x, y
d0_0400: 0c 00 08 00 ..
         # sprite pixels
10_2000: 00 00 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 00
10_2008: 00 1a 1a 19 1a 19 1a 1a
10_2010: 00 1a 1a 19 1a 19 1a 1a
10_2018: 00 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a
10_2020: 00 1a 19 1a 1a 1a 19 1a
10_2028: 00 1a 1a 19 19 19 1a 1a
10_2030: 00 00 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 00
10_2038: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00