As part of the retro computing theme, the Hackaday Badge offers a BASIC interpreter and an emulated Z80 computer running CP/M. However, there's also provision for people who want to get closer to the hardware. This took the form of a "User Program" option on the main menu, which points to a sample C program for modification and experimentation. This C program has access to all the badge system infrastructure utilized by the aforementioned BASIC interpreter and Z80 emulation.

Since I had the luxury of a badge on hand, the easy thing to do first is to launch the sample program and see what it does. I can see some text printed on screen, and a prompt for a key press. Once I pressed a key (no need to hit ENTER) the program switched over to a graphics drawing demonstration.

Hackaday Badge User Program

The colorful patterns cycled through with a very visible scan rate, taking roughly two seconds to update pixels from the top to bottom of the screen. My first reaction was: "Gosh, I hope 0.5 frames per second is not the fastest it can go."

Once I saw it in action, it was time to dive into the source code. Here the text I saw was drawn using the same commands to draw the main menu: clear screen, set color, set X/Y position, and output text.

The first bit of novelty was processing the key press. Unlike the menu, the non-blocking keyboard check is interleaved with text drawing commands that could continue executing while waiting for a key press. This will be useful in things like game loops, where we want the action to keep going even if the user hasn't pressed anything.

After the key press is the drawing demo. It is using a bitwise operator to update screen contents on every pass. And here we have good news: Not only is there an explicit delay in here (there's a code comment that says "less than 1 ms") the screen update is also taking place one pixel at a time, the least efficient method possible.

So the graphics demo update rate is definitely NOT the fastest the badge can go. How fast can we push it? That's something to test in the near future.