What is the killer app for FPGAs? For some, Mohan is the ultra-high data throughput for parallel tasks, which can enable some pretty messy projects. But what if you just started? What about 1980s style video games?
Mr. FPGA project has created some FPGA hardware that basically makes it easy to build. Any Old school video games or computer platforms. That’s a massive clean slate. Of course, you can download and load someone else’s Atari ST or Commodore 64 setup, but if you want To learn When rebuilding FPGs old-school video game machines, you want to get your hands dirty.
[Mister Retro Wolf] Last winter he started a video series (embedded trailer below) where he started a project to recreate a classic video game machine from the ground up using the MiSter FPGA platform. In particular, he is going to recreate the Namco Tank Battalion arcade game from Verilge Schematics.
It is literally building a 6502-based video game machine from scratch (Gateware), so if you’re interested in retrocomputing Or FPGAs, you have something to learn here. It has been acquired through CPU, screen, tilemap graphics and memory so far, but it has not been done yet. To follow, get yourself some hardware and you can probably catch up.
We’ve covered the MiSter FPGA project before, of course, because we think it’s great. And if a video game arcade machine is going to be your gateway drug into the seeded world of programmable gates, so be it.