Gadget Factory

Papilio Plus

  • Create Studio Quality Sound with YM 2151 and FPGA

    Hello FPGA lovers! Today’s post is about making real studio quality music rather than the monotone buzzers from conventional circuits. FPGAs can be used to create monotone sounds such as beeps by using the right combination of DACs and buzzers. However these devices cannot be used to create studio quality sound that not only plays…

  • NES Game Console Recreated On FPGA

    Today we’ve got a great gamer project to share with you in which a dude recreated the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) on a Digilent Nexus 3 FPGA dev board. The reason?  In his words, I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA. Boredom?  That…

  • Recycled junked laptop LCD driven by the Papilio Plus

    Papilio user Alex has managed to drive an LCD screen with his Papilio Plus Board. He used an old broken laptop that was left unused for a long time and took the LCD apart which is a 15″ panel with 1280×800 pixel native resolution to try to drive it with the Papilio Plus FPGA board and…

  • Pipistrello: A Papilio format “Uber Board” with HDMI and BGA.

    Papilio user  Magnusk  made a very interesting FPGA board that he calls Pipistrello, in the past he used some different papilio boards and he like them but he wanted a board with HDMI interface, lots of RAM for buffering, high-speed USB for data streaming and SD-card for data storage. So the only option left was to make…

  • Bomb Jack game implemented in the Papilio Plus

    Alex is at it again! It seems like just the other day that he shared with us his nice project of getting one of his favorite Arcade games “Bomb Jack” working on a prototype Papilio Plus board. As we told you in a previous post the VHDL implementation was not complete and the project still…

  • Sega Master System on the Papilio Plus

    Papilio user Ben Leperchey has successfully managed to run a Sega Master System on a Papilio Plus prototype and he has started an interesting topic in the forum to share with us his work. If you want to try this project on your Papilio Plus prototype you must have these wings: [checklist] Joystick wing VGA wing…

  • ZPUino 1.0 Release Coming Soon!

    The ZPUino is a 32 bit processor running at 100Mhz with an integrated VGA display adapter and YM2149 sound processor. Everything is controlled by a sketch and an easy to use VGA library from the Arduino IDE. The good news is that a 1.0 version of the ZPUino will be released soon probably before the…

  • Check out what it takes to recreate the Bomb Jack game in VHDL.

    Alex, who did this writeup about translating Galaxian’s Verilog code to VHDL is at it again with an exciting new project. He decided to see what it takes to recreate one of his favorite Arcade games (Bomb Jack) using only VHDL, the games schematic, the Open Source T80 Soft Processor, and technical information available on…