Minimalist Homebrew Hardware Recreates Arcade Classics

Common video online games may possibly look primitive by today’s criteria, but the addictive gameplay of Breakout or Pac-Person stays entertaining no make any difference what 10 years you were born in. Preserving the pertinent components functioning will become more difficult as the several years pile up nevertheless, so when [Michal] made the decision to introduce his kids to classic video clip games, he didn’t dig up his previous sport consoles. As an alternative, he resolved to recreate several game titles from scratch utilizing the bare minimal sum of components needed.

The 1st venture is a duplicate of Snake, the arcade common that millennials will figure out from their Nokia phones. [Michal] made an original model utilizing an ATmega328P with an 8×8 LED matrix as a exhibit, but speedily upgraded the hardware to a 16×16 display screen run by an ATmega644, and additional an LED 7-phase show to demonstrate the score. All sections are just soldered on to a piece of prototyping board, with no want for any tailor made PCBs or enclosures.

Match #2 is a facet-scrolling room shooter known as Dino in Space. This video game operates on an ATmega1284 and takes advantage of a 4×20 character textual content show, permitting straightforward graphics as well as an on-screen rating counter. Equivalent hardware, even though with a 128×64 graphic OLED monitor, driven sport #3, a Breakout/Arkanoid clone named Blockbuster 7000.

[Michal]’s web site put up is crammed with fascinating ideas for authentic-daily life sport programming. For instance, a legitimate random range generator results in a instead odd-searching bunch of asteroids in house – tweaking the distribution to make it a bit a lot more uniform drastically enhances the game’s playability. Source data files for all game titles are accessible on [Michal]’s internet site, and contain a description of the precise hardware setup wanted for each recreation.

Recreating Snake on custom made hardware is form of a rite of passage for microcontroller hackers, as you can see in  several extraordinary initiatives. Breakout-fashion online games can also be carried out on several hardware platforms, including analog oscilloscopes.