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
• TI 76489 Audio Chip
• PicoBlaze D/A converter design example
• fpga-synth.net - FPGAs to build/design synthesizers and audio processing engines

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.

• Xilinx LogiCORE CIC (Cascaded Integrator-Comb) compiler

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. 8/25/10 - Run ISE simulator under Win 7 - set webservices to startup automatically