Anyone used a 'Gameduino'

[guddler]

Anyone seen or done anything with one of these?:

http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/

I've been off work for a couple of days and I really must get back to it as all I keep doing is looking at stuff like this, however, I'm quite interested at the moment in the whole retro gaming on modern hardware (FPGAs, mcu's etc., not Pcs, phones). These look pretty interesting. Arduinos themselves are getting cheaper and cheaper and the gameduino shields only £30.

Any other similar things?

The whole retro stuff on FPGA seems to be drying up a bit, especially when it comes to Spartan 3E, not surprising, I guess it is getting on a bit in relative FPGA terms.

 

[cmjones01]

No, I haven't done anything directly with the Gameduino but I do FPGA stuff and Arduino stuff separately, and I wish I'd come up with an idea like that! It looks very capable, especially the ability to microcode the hardware and do clever background effects and scrolling.

Chris

 

[guddler]

Does look interesting I have to say. I'm going to pick up a second Arduino mega since they're less than £20 now and might get one of the Gameduino's as well. Not really sure if I'll use it or not, or if it will just become another discarded play thing

Am after a CPC-6128 at the moment too. So many toys

 

[guddler]

Well, this turned up this morning. Haven't really had a chance to look at it yet as I'm pretty busy with work at the moment but I did plug it in and upload a test sketch to the Arduino and it looks really cool. Such a simple concept it's one of those "why didn't I think of that" moments

Basically the 'Gameduino' provides an area of screen memory that is shared between the CPU (Arduino) and GPU (FPGA on Gameduino). A bit of microcode on the gameduino constantly scans the memory and displays it's contents (at a given refresh rate). In addition there is a small area of the FPGA defined as a custom processor that as standard provides some hardware scrolling and sprite effects but can ultimately be re-programmed and customised to your own needs as desired.

Basically, dare I say it, very relevent to this forum. Just like an Arcade board where you have the CPU area with it's own RAM and ROM, a shared area of memory for graphics and then an area of the board dedicated to displaying the contents of that memory. Just for good measure, think of the custom microcode area on the FPGA as similar to the state machine on Asteroids or something like that (that would be one example use for it in the historical Arcade world).

All in all, a really classy yet simple bit of kit that I can easily see me losing myself in.

And the beauty is, because it's just an FPGA and it's all open source it can be modified if desired to add different graphics modes and so on (OK - admittedly, some know-how needed).

Oh, just a heads up, in case anyone reads this and decides to take the plunge (post here if you do incidentally!), to use it with an Arduino Mega you have to jumper the 3 SPI pins on the Gameduino (11,12,13) to pins 51,50 & 52 respectively on the Arduino as they're in a different location on the mega. No soldering though, you can just use jumper wires for that which anyone with an Arduino will no doubt have.

Martin.