Gadget Factory

Papilio Arcade

  • Tetris-like game for the Papilio and Arcade Megawing

    Sometris is a Tetris-like game that Papilio user Peter Ivanov has written for the Papilio One and Arcade MegaWing, the game works with DesignLab 1.0.8. This is a tetris-like game for Papilio One 500K + Aracade Megawing. You need a VGA monitor and optionally a Atari/Commodore compatible joystick. I’ve used Papilio DesignLab 1.0.8. The source…

  • Robots Game Implemented On The Papilio!

    Inspired by the snake game our forum member Jaxartes has successfully managed  to implement the Robots game on the Papilio Pro with the Arcade MegaWing using Verilog, his source code should be able to run on other FPGA platforms with comparable capacity. It displays in 1024×768 on a VGA monitor, and is controlled by keyboard.  Or,…

  • Old School Graphics: How did they work? (Part II)

      More content on graphics for old school gamers in this great video, especially for Apple II and Atari 2600 aficionados. It details how graphics worked on monochrome screens and color screens using 8 bits of memory. Apple II graphics used only 16 colors in low resolution mode and 6 colors in high resolution mode, not…

  • Old School Graphics: How did they work?

    Many of us spent hours, if not days in front of Ataris, Commodores, Nintendos and other old school gaming systems. Playing colorful games was then  possible on 8 kB, 16kB and 32 kB video RAM. An excellent video from digg.com shows how colors were coded on those early gaming consoles and also details how pixels sprites were…

  • Run your ROMs on Papilio Arcade hardware with ROMVault!

    The latest project from GadgetFactory has just been finished and we’re very happy to show you ROMVault! Running old school video games on a Papilio Arcade hardware is a thrilling experience for old time gamers and a good challenge for technology enthusiasts. There is sometimes an issue while running those games: It is not always easy to determine…

  • Atari devs dissect Yars’ Revenge, Adventure, Atari’s woes

    Here is a very interesting article about the development of some of the early Atari 2600 games. It’s fun that we can recreate these classic games on an FPGA! “I’m going to tell you about the design of Adventure for the 2600, a game I designed in 1979,” Warren Robinett said simply and plainly to…

  • MatthewH puts together a simple SDRAM controller for use with the Papilio Pro.

    Papilio user Matthew Hagerty put together a very nice implementation of a simple SDRAM controller for the Papilio Pro FPGA. Written in VHDL, it sacrifices some speed for ease of use and simplicity. After all, not every project needs to use the full capacity of the SDRAM chip. You can read about his epic adventure…

  • Pengo game running on the Papilio Pro.

    Papilio user and longtime Papilio arcade contributer Alex has managed to get the Pengo game running on his Papilio Pro board. Here is a quick demo video of the game running on the Papilio Pro: Alex writes, “The Pengo hardware is very close to the Pacman hardware but annoyingly it has just enough differences that…