I received a cute gadget in the mail the other day: a Gameduino. It’s a small Xilinx FPGA on an Arduino shield that can create VGA and sound output. It acts like a simple coprocessor, connected via the SPI bus of the Arduino.

In an effort to get people started on thinking about the Gameduino, I tried to hack together a quick graphics demo, just to test my own basic understanding. The evening that I received it I only had an hour to hack, so I only got
this far:

But apparently this was enough to get me an email from Colin, who has started a page on Gameduino programming which seems awesome. In particular, he chose to implement a complete version of Space Invaders for the Gameduino. I bow in your direction, Colin. Truly awesome.

I haven’t had much more time to work on mine, but I might get a chance over the weekend. Stay tuned for further Gameduino experiments.