Not everyone adores Arduino and this is great because other systems are great too. MSP430 has gained popularity since cheap launchpad release. So if you like MSP430 here are great news – a Launchpad GamingPack was developed that enables developing video games without digging too deep in resource hungry applications.

Gaming Pack shield has two ports for NES gaming controllers – no problem to build two player games. The power lies inside FPGA which takes care of 400×300 VGA and sound output. Shield uses same rendering technique as in the Gameduino. Shield communicates to launchpad using SPI interface. There are several games developed to demonstrate it capability. These include Brick breaker, Tetris, and well known space invader. Examples can be found at GitHub.