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 require more troubleshooting.

He now has all these issues fixed and the game is fully functional on a Papilio Plus board with an Arcade MegaWing along with graphics and audio.

Alex started this project in 2011 and he was obliged to put it on ice since the game uses a total of 16 ROM chips adding up to 112Kb of memory but his FPGA board has internal space for only 40Kb, until he got a prototype Papilio Plus board which has a 512Kb of static RAM chip and that was perfect for his project then he picked it up again.

The process was not easy for Alex, He started with translating schematic to VHDL and then he went through several obstacles one of them was the bunch of ROMs that need to be available inside the SRAM chip at power on and we know the SRAM is a volatile storage medium fortunately for him he had another project before about Bootstrapping SRAM from FLASH on the Papilio Plus:

“briefly, on power on or reset, the boostrap takes over the SRAM chip buses and copies the contents of the serial FLASH chip in to the SRAM, then releases the SRAM buses to the user and signals it is done.”

The final part of his project was the debugging of the game, he wrote a well detailed documentation to explain this part and all the process and how to build the project…

Click here to check out this project and read the whole thing, complete with tech specs, game contole, etc…

The full source code is also available for download you can find the download links in the original project page.

Really nice game to play with on the Papilio Plus, What do you think?

Feel free to discuss in the comments thread.

Thanks for sharing your project with us, Alex!