Using FPGAs For 2-Player Space Invaders

A couple of intrepid students taking a course on embedded systems came up with a new spin on the classic game Space Invaders – two-screen multiplayer!  Using a Virtex II development (FPGA) board and some other gear, they managed to clone Space Invaders and have it run on two screens with some innovative competetive twists.  From the write-up we found at Hackaday:

“The guys built their Space Invaders clone on a Virtex II dev board. Wanting a little more hardware development, they picked up a pair of RF trancievers so the two boards could communicate with each other. The rules of two-player Space Invaders is fairly simple; if you destroy an alien, there’s a 30% chance it will appear on your opponent’s screen. Hit the space ship that flies along the top of the screen, and 1 to 7 aliens will appear on the opponent’s screen. It’s a bit like two player Tetris where your victories bring about your friend’s downfall.”

We were thinking that it might be pretty cool to modify our Papilio Arcade MegaWing to have two VGA outputs and then implement two versions of the Space Invaders game in the FPGA.  What do you guys think?

Check out the original article, complete with video of this thing running over at Hackaday.

(via Hackaday, original article by Brian Benchoff)