好奇机

I'm building a game console around the very cool Gameduino Audio / Video board. I'm calling it the Haoqiji, which is Chinese for the Curious Machine.

Gameduino Audio / Video Board

The Gameduino generates a 400×300×72fps VGA signal and synthesizes stereo audio. It has advanced features: a smooth scrolled tile engine, 256 simultaneous sprites, pixel-perfect collision detection, and a 16-bit coprocessor. So the Gameduino lies somewhere between the Turbografx-16 and the SNES in terms of graphics power (but greatly outperforms both of those platforms on certain benchmarks). Audio is synthesized by adding noise and sine waves: there are 64 total voices, and non-sinusoidal waveforms can be created by combining voices together.

The Gameduino needs a lot of horsepower, so it's based around a Spartan-3A FPGA. These powerful chips are essentially reconfigurable ASICs, but are relatively expensive, and add about $17 to the cost of each Gameduino.

Where to buy a Gameduino

The Gameduino is the only difficult-to-find component in this project!

The original Kickstarter campaign ended in 2011, so there's no chance to buy one there. As far as I know, the only current supplier is Mouser. Their board adds a few extra components that we won't be using for this project, but the price is reasonable at ~$30.

You can see looking at my photos that I'm using a clone from LinkSprite (no longer available). The inventor, James Bowman, has generously made the design open-source, so this remixing is all okay.

Testing your Gameduino

Gameduino only needs +5V, +3.3V, and ground connections:

If it's connected properly, it will launch its own builtin demo, no external processor required! You should see a title screen and hear a chord.