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AtMEGA32 Based Arcade Gaming Platform

January 30, 2012 by Chris
“Cade9 is my small embedded project consisting of ATmega32 MCU with custom hardware which I hand soldered on a matrix board. This was my undergraduate 3rd year minor project. It uses the open source cocoOS as scheduler. On top of CADE9 one can implement classic arcade games like snakes, pong, bricks, breakout etc.”

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USB Adapter For Atari Joysticks

January 28, 2012 by Chris
“The Stelladaptor seems to be a solid product but I think that the price per unit, at $29.95, is a bit too high for a single-joystick adapter. That's why I started thinking about building an adapter myself so I would be able to play emulated games (and others too) with these sticks.”

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NES On-A-Chip via FPGA

January 20, 2012 by Chris
“My goal was to implement an older embedded system entirely in VHDL. I chose the NES due to its complexity and variety of subsystems. The idea is to prove that chips can be modeled in VHDL and synthesized on an FPGA to replace either single ICs in old systems or the systems themselves.”

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Bluetooth Media Remote

January 3, 2012 by Chris
“The final Micro-controller I decided to use on the final product was a ATMEGA8. In the first post I used an ATMEGA8515. For several reasons I decided not to use this one in the final product. Firstly, it’s a 40 pin package. I do not need that many I/O lines. It draws more power. And finally, I need that one for my studies at uni. So an ATMEGA8 was used.”

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Vector-based Pong on an Oscilloscope

December 19, 2011 by Chris
“For my MCU Project Laboratory final project, I created a two-player Pong game on an analog o-scope. Two potentiometer knobs functioned as the controllers and A/D converters translated the voltage set by the controllers into coordinate information for the paddles. The XY mode of o-scope enabled two voltage inputs to direct the CRT's electron gun around the display to generate 2D graphics.”

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Magic 8 Thing

December 7, 2011 by Chris
“For those who don't know what a Magic 8 Thing is, it is a Magic 8 Ball, made with an ATMega328, an LCD, a surplus mercury tilt switch from a retired thermostat and some code. I call it a 'Thing' instead of a 'Ball' because my version is both non-spherical and bears no functional resemblance to an actual 'Magic 8 Ball'.”

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Starfox FPGA Implementation

November 30, 2011 by Chris
“Our project was an attempt to implement Starfox from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) on the FPGA using the VGA running in 320 pixels by 240 pixels screen resolution. The source of the project idea is from the classic game Starfox on the SNES. This was one of the first games to display 3D models.”

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The FPGA Adventure Vision Project

November 2, 2011 by Chris
“The Adventure Vision is a cartridge based, electronic hand held video game that was manufactured in 1982 by Entex Industries, Inc. The system measures about 13 1/4" X 10" X 9" and uses one vertical strip of 40 red LEDs and a spinning mirror to produce an apparent screen resolution of 150x40 (drawn at 15 frames/sec).”

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Electronic Dice via PIC

October 19, 2011 by Chris
“Built using a PIC16F84, about 4 hours worth of code and a few bits on a breadboard. This was the first time I've worked with PIC's so it was a learning exercise. I started with the 'Hello World' microcontroller equivalent i.e. Blinking LED, then tried the 'Knight Rider' sequencing LEDs, and then hacked this together.”

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Adding an RGB input to an NTSC TV

October 15, 2011 by Chris
“RGB signaling provides the cleanest form of analog video you can get from any video device. No wonder why computer monitors have used analog RGB since the introduction of VGA in 1987. But television is another story. Since the dawn of color TV, we’ve been stuck with lossy encoding methods in order to cram a full-color picture in the limited bandwidth of a monochrome transmission.”

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