FPGA Atari bronze age

James1095

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For the past couple of months I've been working on replicating various bronze age Atari games so I thought I'd share them here in case anyone else would like to play with them. All are targeted toward the cheapest FPGA board I've found, the EP2C5T144C8 mini board that is available from many different Chinese sellers for under $15. Porting to other hardware is trivial but these boards are small and cheap enough to integrate into mini dedicated cabinets. So far all of these games are small enough that they fit entirely in the FPGA so the only external components required are some resistors to mix the video, an audio amp and some controls.

Attached to this post is my latest, Ultra Tank.

I'll see if I can get my post from another thread moved to here, in that I posted Super Breakout, Sprint 1 and Sprint 2. I'm currently working on Sprint 4 and Subs but not done with those yet.

I have limited time to offer support with these but if you have questions please post them here and I'll try to answer everything, that way I won't have to answer the same questions 20 different times.

Also if anyone finds any bugs or inconsistencies compared to real hardware please do let me know. I don't currently own boards for any of these so I have nothing to compare to aside from MAME and occasionally Youtube videos.
 

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Still hoping someone comes along with some FPGA setup for dummies, as this stuff looks like it would be fun to explore.
 
Also if anyone finds any bugs or inconsistencies compared to real hardware please do let me know. I don't currently own boards for any of these so I have nothing to compare to aside from MAME and occasionally Youtube videos.

Good work on these games. :) It is exciting that we are seeing a lot of new projects recently. What you said above is the truly important part, so I definitely encourage you to seek out original hardware, or those who have it, to verify your implementations. Without verification there is just as much room for error with fpga, as with emulation.
 
This is really cool. I ordered one of these boards after reading your first post so I can mess around with what you've done.

I always wanted to make a subs cabaret with a couple of cheap b&w portable TVs but couldn't figure out how to get two sets of composite outputs running cheaply. This might do it!
 
Do you have anything on how to hook the boards up and schematics for any external hardware they need? Also any plans to do Steeple Chase, Gun Fighter or Boot Hill? I know an operator who has all three and they're either missing the boards or are broken. Note: If you do Steeple Chase, please be sure to include the I/O for the 8-track it used, which usually doesn't even have the connector installed on most boards. It's incredibly rare and most of the games were never released with it, but it would be a cool feature to set up with an MP3 player substitute if the original ever gets captured or someone wants to make a custom one.

I always wanted to make a subs cabaret with a couple of cheap b&w portable TVs but couldn't figure out how to get two sets of composite outputs running cheaply. This might do it!

Be sure to post about it when it's done, sounds like an awesome project!

Oh, and MERRY CHRISTMAS BTW :D
 
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All are targeted toward the cheapest FPGA board I've found, the EP2C5T144C8 mini board that is available from many different Chinese sellers for under $15.
Did not realise how cheap those things are, will buy a couple and have a play. Following thread, noticed you have not mentioned it yet but particularly interested in the asteroids work you have done.
 
I'll see if I can answer all the questions here.

The hardware can almost certainly handle Tank 8, the issue is finding a legible schematic. As if the hard to read aspect wasn't enough, many of these schematics have errors.

Unfortunately a "dummies guide to FPGA development" is probably tricky simply because it's a very complex topic but a free book I found helpful was "Free Range VHDL." One of the most important things to grasp is that you are not writing a program, you are describing hardware using a special language that just happens to look superficially like a programming language. Existing programming experience could actually be a liability more than a help. Digital logic design experience is helpful, if you want to recreate a whole game it's critical that you fully grasp how the circuit works. Due to the way These old games are designed you can't simply translate the whole schematic and expect it to work.

For hooking these up look at the top level VHDL file and then in Quartus refer to Assignments> Pin Planner.

No current plans to do Stunt Cycle but it could happen eventually. That's a pre-CPU game, for now I'm focused on the 6502 games and later 6800.

Subs is on the list, it's actually partially working. The way they drive two monitors is pretty clever. The sync signal goes to both monitors and then individual background sections and motion objects are gated to the correct monitor as the beams scan the screen. You could easily do the same thing on the other games if for some reason you wanted some of the objects to show up on a separate monitor. All the object video signals are generated separately and then mixed together in the video output section.
 
You could really dumb it down with a step by step how to install a finished image on an fpga. That computer space version would be cool to load up too since it cant be purchased on a finished fpga.
 
Well that's effectively what I've provided here, the entire project is ready to go, just load it on the board. You'll need to download te free version of Quartus II, I think 13.0 SP1 is the latest version with Cyclone II support and you'll need an Altera Byte Blaster cable, the $5 Chinese clones work fine. If you can load a sketch onto an Arduino you can load one of my projects onto one of these boards.

Personally I have no interest in ready made closed source projects, the internet is littered with people showing off cool FPGA projects without sharing the code for others to play with. Half the fun is experimenting an porting to other hardware so I open-source everything I create in hopes that others will enjoy, improve and build upon it. With an FPGA based game you can hack and modify all you want without damaging original vintage hardware.
 
Cool. Think I will buy an fpga board and the stuff in 2018 and toy with loading stuff. Pi has been fun with loading software images but it is getting a bit repetitive. Time for a new experiment.

Thanks for posting your projects!
 
FPGA is one of many aspects to the future of the hobby. If you want one cabinet that plays 100 games, emulation is hard to beat. If you want a dedicated cabinet that boots instantly and plays as close to the original as possible then FPGA is the way to go.

I just checked my version of Quartus II, it's 13.0.1 SP1, I believe this is the latest one that will work for the Cyclone II.
 
FPGA is one of many aspects to the future of the hobby. If you want one cabinet that plays 100 games, emulation is hard to beat. If you want a dedicated cabinet that boots instantly and plays as close to the original as possible then FPGA is the way to go.

I just checked my version of Quartus II, it's 13.0.1 SP1, I believe this is the latest one that will work for the Cyclone II.


I started compiling some of the reference info for novices to get started-

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?p=3726697#post3726697
 
The Spartan 3 is of a similar generation as the Cyclone II I'm using here, possibly a bit newer. I have several Xilinx boards too including one that is probably the same as that. I've found that overall I prefer Quartus over ISE though and with FPGAs it mostly comes down to the software since you're stuck with whatever the vendor provides. My designs could certainly be ported over to Xilinx hardware, I've made it as platform agnostic as possible however it does take some work. Quartus has a convenient ability to use standard hex files to load internal ROMs which Xilinx lacks.

You don't have to worry too much about obsolescence here when replicating 30-40 year old games. As long as the software supporting the FPGA family is still available and will run on your PC it doesn't really matter.
 
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