FPGAWorkshopMartin

Three ideas so far:

Multiple 8-bit game console sound chip emulator. Generate the sounds of the '80s: C64, NES, Atari, etc. I need to research some of the chips but it looks like there is plenty of info out there. Manuals/schematics:

• Mikes Arcade
• Important Space Invader information

Limited AM radio. Use passive front end Nyquist filter, digital down-converter and low-pass filter to receive the lower part of the AM broadcast band. Got the idea from Oct '09 Circuit Cellar article 'Multi-rate Techniques and CIC Filter'. Success would be anything that worked better than the chunk of geranium and safety pin radio from grade school.

Game of life analyzer. Run game of life for many generations while saving/encoding previous states of the game array to look for repeated and other patterns. VGA game output would be fun too. Some fun life/CA links:

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_573/MARCH_3_06/D_0000_Intro-Cellular-Automata-Artificial-Life.ppt http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_573/MARCH_3_06/D_0050.Margolus-Physical-Reversible-Models-of-CAs.ppt http://www.it.lth.se/suleyman/ref_docs/malki_CIMSA%2005.pdf

1/27/10 - Patched together some Pong code (game not the professor) on the Spartan 3E dev board to learn VGA interface. Pong code lacks sounds - might as well give that a try.