Papilio user Baggers made a nice arcade game named “PacManicMinerMan” which is an Open Source recreation of the ZX Spectrum ManicMiner game running on the PacMan Arcade Hardware.
And since the classic Pac-Man arcade hardware has been ported to the Papilio Arcade kit the PacManicMinerMan game should run perfectly on it! Here is a demo video of this game:
Unfortunately no Roms are available yet, Baggers plans to release it at PlayExpo but may be persuaded to release it sooner if there is enough interest in the forums.
Watch for the release of the game at PlayExpo, or drop by the forums to express your interest in an earlier release.
Alex is at it again! It seems like just the other day that he shared with us his nice project of getting one of his favorite Arcade games “Bomb Jack” working on a prototype Papilio Plus board. As we told you in a previous post the VHDL implementation was not complete and the project still require more troubleshooting.
He now has all these issues fixed and the game is fully functional on a Papilio Plus board with an Arcade MegaWing along with graphics and audio.
Alex started this project in 2011 and he was obliged to put it on ice since the game uses a total of 16 ROM chips adding up to 112Kb of memory but his FPGA board has internal space for only 40Kb, until he got a prototype Papilio Plus board which has a 512Kb of static RAM chip and that was perfect for his project then he picked it up again.
The process was not easy for Alex, He started with translating schematic to VHDL and then he went through several obstacles one of them was the bunch of ROMs that need to be available inside the SRAM chip at power on and we know the SRAM is a volatile storage medium fortunately for him he had another project before about Bootstrapping SRAM from FLASH on the Papilio Plus:
“briefly, on power on or reset, the boostrap takes over the SRAM chip buses and copies the contents of the serial FLASH chip in to the SRAM, then releases the SRAM buses to the user and signals it is done.”
The final part of his project was the debugging of the game, he wrote a well detailed documentation to explain this part and all the process and how to build the project…
Hey everyone! Here is a new exciting project that has just been realized by Papilio user Laurent Siou, he has successfully made a 3-Axis IMU with a Papilio One 250k board!!
Laurent’s goal was to realize an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) for a camera and take in-flight stabilized videos. His particular design is comprised of :
Papilio One 250K board
ITG-3200 eval board
BMA180 accelerometer
HMC5883L magnetometer
And to make all that work Laurent used the AVR8 core 1.6.0 with Arduino IDE and he modified the soft core to add:
3-axis servo control IP adapted from timer section
I2C IP adapted from Generic WB hard Master I2C
Some VHDL cleanup and glue
Watch this video below to have a look at the end result and hopefully you will find this project as cool as I do!!
Feel free to discuss in the comments thread.
Follow the break to watch another quick demonstration video (more…)
If you want to try this project on your Papilio Plus prototype you must have these wings:
Joystick wing
VGA wing
MicroSD wing
Audio wing
Since the first version uses a SD card we can’t use the Arcade MegaWing. Instead of all these wings listed above to run this project, but Ben has been working on a new version that should work fine with the Arcade MegaWing.
Ben wrote a nice bootloader to select ROMs from a SD Card.
“Load the bit file : the bootloader shows the content of your SD card. Pick a rom and it gets loaded into the SRAM, and the system boots it : you’re ready to go !”
Feel free to discuss in our forum this interesting topic and share with us your suggestions to help improve this project.
Vhdlnerd has designed a VGA controller that primarily Targets the Papilio One 250k board but it should works with the Papilio One 500k and it Uses the VGA Wing.
The basic features of this controller that Vhdlnerd actually calls it VN VGA Controller are:
Generates a text display
Glorious 3-bit Color Output
Hardware Cursor (with selectable style)
Completely Scalable Design
The controller can be reconfigured via a few constants
Many different VGA resolution standards may be selected
Different fonts can be selected
All logic and RAMs are inferred
“Right now I have the core VGA stuff working: VGA signal timing generation and outputting a display of all the font characters repeatedly. This was enough to test how well the core scales to handle a 1600×1200 VGA resolution.”
He had a first cut at the VN VGA controller done and he also uploaded the source code to Github you can check all that and more by joining the discussion here.
Feel free to discuss in our forum, any feedback is appreciated to help us improve this project.
As you can see in the images above he put the papilio board between two stripboards and he made a wing with a stripboard too to connect the camera and a reset button.
Voelker is still looking to improve his design and he will try to make a megawing pcb to connect the camera, a reset button, give connection to a fifo port (for the ft2232h), a serial port, and a lcd port.
Good news, the Open Source Atari 2600 project, A2601, is now working on the Papilio Arcade hardware. We got some time to work on the NTSC to VGA conversion and we have some video of the A2601 with VGA output in action. We hope to have the code cleaned up and ready for release very soon!
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