I still remember long evenings sitting by TV screen playing all these video games. Well to play them now it doesn’t seem to be a big fun as there are tons of new computer games. But believe me – it is fun to make these games run on other platforms like on FPGA. So this project intent to run old z80/68000 based video games on Altera DE1 FPGA board. It is set to run them on monitors with VGA input.

FPGA runs soft cores that run game codes, but it still lacks sound and some games won’t work properly. Project is still in early stages so don’t expect fully featured game platform.

Probably you’ve been to movies and know well what surround sound is. For this usually a bunch of speakers is positioned around you to make you feel as you are in place the movie shows. But there are techniques where same effect can be simulated with two speakers – ideally with headphones. This is so called real time head related transfer function (HRTF).

Probably you’ve seen many computer programs that do that by simply dragging imaginary sound sources around screen, so this FPGA project does this and even more including multiple sound streams that are positioned with filter coefficients stored in 512kB SRAM chip on the DE2 FPGA board; graphical user interface where sound sources can be dragged with mouse pointer.

You probably got used to Arduino and know very well how standard Arduino board looks like. Well this one is a bit more different. This Arduino actually is software based and runs inside FPGA. Running soft processors in FPGA isn’t a new thing – you can find soft AVR8 microcontroller in opencores.org.

So what is a benefit of running an Arduino of FPGA? Well remember that FPGA is very flexible and fast platform so virtually there is no limits in prototyping… if there are no analog signals included. Anything else including UART, PWM, Timers, interrupts are working fine. Soft processor can be customized to have more I/Os or more peripherals like more PWM channels. Clock speed can be also higher that in standard Arduino. They actually modified Arduino IDE a bit to fit soft processor requirements, but you get same feel on writing sketches like for regular ones. I think running just Arduino on FPGA isn’t very effective way, but think about bigger scale project where soft processor is a small part of it. Because of programming simplicity and lots of open source resources it may be much easier to do some routine tasks in Arduino style.

This is an implementation of Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game on FPGA that outputs image via VGA (320×240). It actually displays 3D models – actually wireframe. Anyway behind this there are some math and transformations hidden.

User interface has been implemented via NIOS II console where model can be controlled by w, a, s, d keys. The game itself is very limited as it has only one wireframe ship and asteroid. Don’t expect complete product as it is only a Cornell university student final project. Not much of 3D feel but project can serve as great starting point for other cool games.

Probably you know that FPGA is pretty universal chip that can be programmed to do almost any task at high speed and efficiency. FPGA can do multiple tasks at in parallel so this makes it attractive in such designs where graphics manipulations are required.

In this project Cornell university students aimed to design programmable graphics processing unit that could do graphics transformations parametrically. This is tied to physics simulations where several objects could be manipulated in parametric level. This graphical processor has one pipeline where multiple pieces of data are operated in parallel. The design consists of three major parts: edge pipeline, transformation pipeline and rastering pipeline. This is quite complex stuff so more details in full project.