Dual-Core Architecture

Cross-core communication uses volatile flags — no mutex overhead needed for this use case.

• Core 0 — Game logic & display
  • XOR sprite rendering
  • DMA double buffering
  • Deferred flush (union bounding box)
  • Clock / alarm state machine
  • Input handling

• Core 1 — Audio engine
  • Square wave generation on GP8
  • Drift-free timing
  • Melody + SFX queue
  • All code runs from RAM

Software Versions

Three build targets share the same game logic core:

• Pico (Pico SDK )
• MS-DOS (Watcom C 10.6)
• Linux/Windows (GCC, SDL 1.2)