I just finished my latest hardware project, which I decided to call "Gameduino".
Gameduino is a video game adapter for the Arduino. It handles the
scrolling, sprites, collision detection, and sound. This leaves the
Arduino free to run gameplay and handle whatever controller you can
dream up. The example programs - videos are on each page - give you an
idea of what it can do.
The arduino gaming development has just landed on the moon! I don't know any details of the chip on the gameduino. Care to educate the rest of us? Where do you store sprites and backgrounds? Any fancy multiple backgrounds like Kick Master? I think this looks very much like a Nintendo, only with better graphics. Have you thought about adding a couple of plugs on the gameduino to accept some game pads?
The chip in the Gameduino is an FPGA from Xilinx - FPGAs are effectively programmable hardware. They have a whole bunch of logic gates - this is what runs the Gameduino's video, audio and compute systems. The chip also has some super-fast SRAM - and this is where you store the graphics and audio data. There is about 32Kbytes of memory, all counted, and this is where you store sprites, backgrounds and audio samples. This poster has details of the memory layout:
Yes, multiple scrolling backgrounds are possible - hopefully we will see examples as it gets into the hands of hundreds of developers in a few weeks.
Game pads are a possibility... but Sparkfun already sells a nice gamepad shield for $13:
I think you should instead provide a connector for PlayStation 1 and 2 controllers, or a connector for a Wii Classic Controller. The PlayStation uses SPI and the Wii uses I2C, both very easy to use. Also you can find these controllers anywhere, as opposed to outdated controllers such as NES or SNES which are rare.
