Pong

Pong is an arcade game developed for the Mk operating system. Pong is a custom recreation of the classic paddle game, with a few adjustments — the player controls a paddle and competes against the computer, trying to score by sending the ball past the computer-controlled paddle.

Pong is intended as a getting-started example showing how to build, install, and run an external .elf application on top of Mk.

Controls

Key	Action
↑	Move right paddle up
↓	Move right paddle down
R	Start / Restart the game
Q	Quit the application
CTRL+A	Toogle auto-play mode

Installation

Build the application (see Build below), then copy pongGameRelease.elf and its icon mk_pong.bmp to the Mk file system at:

mk/apps/pong/

This path corresponds to Mk/Storage/mk/apps/pong/ in the Mk repository. Once installed, Pong appears in the Mk home screen application list.

Build

Requirements

All platforms

• GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 10.3-2021.10 — must be added to your PATH
• GNU Make 4.3
• Mk Includes

Windows only (one of the following)

• MSYS2 (recommended) — provides sh, find, rm and other Unix tools required by the Makefile
• Git for Windows — Git Bash ships the same Unix tools

The Makefile automatically detects MSYS2 or Git Bash at their default installation paths (C:/msys64 and C:/Program Files/Git). If your installation is elsewhere, update MSYS2_BIN or GITBASH_BIN at the top of Pong/Make/Makefile.

Steps

1. Clone the repository and make sure the Mk Includes directory is present at ../../Mk/Mk/Includes relative to the Make directory, or update INCLUDES_API_PATH in Pong/Make/Makefile accordingly.

2. Add arm-none-eabi-gcc to your PATH (verify with arm-none-eabi-gcc --version).

3. Build:

make clean
make all        # Release build — optimised, stripped

This produces pongGameRelease.elf, ready to install on the target.

Use the Debug target for a -O0 build with full debug symbols:

make Debug

The application is compiled as a position-independent shared object (-fPIC -shared) and is relocatable into any 64 KB SDRAM page by the Mk dynamic loader.

Available targets

Target	Description
all	Alias for Release
Release	Optimised build (-Ofast), stripped
Debug	Unoptimised build (-O0) with full debug symbols
clean	Remove all generated files (.o, .d, .su, .elf, .map)

Compiler versions

Tool	Version
arm-none-eabi-gcc	10.3.1 20210824 (GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 10.3-2021.10)
arm-none-eabi-g++	10.3.1 20210824 (GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 10.3-2021.10)
make	GNU Make 4.3

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Continuous Integration

Every push and pull request is automatically built by GitHub Actions. The workflow installs the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain, runs make Release, and uploads pongGameRelease.elf as a downloadable build artifact.

The latest successful build artifact is available on the Actions tab of this repository.

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Writing your own application

Pong is the reference example for the Mk application model. For a step-by-step guide on how to structure your own Mk application — descriptor, entry point, event listeners, memory layout — see the Mk wiki.

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License

Copyright (C) 2024 RENARD Mathieu. All rights reserved.

Mk is free software; It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The content of this repository is bound by the BSD-3-Clause license.