Gadget Factory

Indie Game ‘Meat Boy’ Cloned For Play On An FPGA

— by

hoppasaurus


By way of Reddit, here is one college student’s project in which he recreates the awesome indie Flash game Meat Boy on an FPGA.

The FPGA Meat Boy creator, known only as “skipToThe3nd” used an Altera DE2 for the project.  Here is an excerpt from his Reddit thread (when skipToThe3nd was asked about his display engine for the game):

In general, the display engine waits for the Meat Boy’s next position, scrolls the window if necessary, then paints the frame via a VGA connection in the SXGA 60Hz protocol (http://martin.hinner.info/vga/timing.html).

I used a built-in PLL to generate the 108MHz SXGA pixel clock from Altera DE2’s 27MHz clock.  The pixel clock also drives x/y-counters, which are useful for knowing what color to paint and also for partitioning SRAM ownership between the physics and display engines for their map-data reads (as the map is described 2-bits per 32×32 tile in SRAM).

Way cool to attempt such an ambitious game on your FPGA!  You can take a look at the source code for the project here.

For reference (and for fun!) here’s a link to the original Meat Boy game.  That’s essentially what he was aiming for.  It gives a sense of the crazy amount of work that must’ve gone into this dude’s project!

(via Reddit)

,

Newsletter

Our latest updates in your e-mail.

Leave a Reply