Apparently if your hello world example is longer than a couple of lines then you are open to ridicule.

I suspect people who say this are blissfully unaware exactly what _main gets up to before your code runs and lets not even think about C++.

Still it helps to remove as much gubbins as possible so the code that's running becomes obvious. Fun64 is built around the idea that you should define the hardware before the program runs so lets hide all that away inside a builtin function that will set you up a basic looking screen to work with.

Introducing the configurator, this function will provide various setups depending on the mode requested and also provide a main function that will allow you to provide a single update function rather than dealing with more complexities. A single update function is less optimal but a perfectly reasonable way to write short bits of test code.

So far the only mode we have is "fun64" which will get you a 60fps 320x240 screen with three layers and the Swanky32 palette. The three layers gives us a copper background, a tile+sprite foreground and finally a text overlay on the very top. For graphical memory we have a 64x64 area of 8x8 tiles (4096 in total) and we auto upload the 4x8 fun64 font to the very first line for use by the text layer.

NB: If you clobber this top line all your text will go funny, just like on real hardware.

The main point of the layers is so we can have drop shadows between them, the text layer on top gives us some very cheap 80s looking text menus when used with solid blocks of background color.