* video output is 400x300 pixels in 512 colors
* all color processed internally at 15-bit precision
* compatible with any standard VGA monitor (800x600 @ 72Hz)
* background graphics
o 512x512 pixel character background
o 256 characters, each with independent 4 color palette
o pixel-smooth X-Y wraparound scroll
* foreground graphics
o each sprite is 16x16 pixels with per-pixel transparency
o each sprite can use 256, 16 or 4 colors
o four-way rotate and flip
o 96 sprites per scan-line, 1536 texels per line
o pixel-perfect sprite collision detection
* audio output is a stereo 12-bit frequency synthesizer
* 16 independent voices 10-4000 Hz
* per-voice sine wave or white noise
The Uzebox AVCore (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9024) is arguably a more impressive technical achievement: sound and color video generated in software from an overclocked AVR, no FPGA magic, and less than $20 in parts.
Wow, this is really nicely done. This system is a love letter to the best game consoles of the 80's.
It looks like it would be great for building small-scale interactive museum exhibits. You want something durable, easy to program, hard to mess with and self-contained that can output video simply and is able to connect to highly custom inputs.
I'm a little concerned it might be hard to replace, though, considering the Gameduino is a custom chip.
Museum exhibits often have very long lives. The legendary Charles and Ray Eames exhibit for IBM, Mathematica, is now 50 years old but still on display at the Boston Museum of Science. Okay, not really relevant, but I totally love that exhibit:
This was impressively polished, it really shows that the author has been around a bit. :) I found the lack of any more concrete specifications a bit annoying, but maybe I just failed at locating information about e.g. what chip powers the board.
Programming "to the metal" is a VERY different experience and one that can be satisfying much in the same way that baking your own bread (flour, water, yeast..) can be.
Now the Gameduino abstracts a lot so maybe it's bad comparison; one is not doing opcode/cycle counting to time refresh rates of NTSC signals!
One of the draws of arduino for me is that it by its very nature invites frankenstein type arrangements of hardware.
Just because this thing is old school tech, doesn't mean the peripherals people connect to it will be. Accelerometers are very popular in the arduino world. It wont be long before somebody manages to get their pets to interact with it somehow as well, that seems a strong meme in arduinoland.
Yes you can interface all these things to a PC as well, but there are many layers of abstraction imposed on you. And you don't get to fashion your own casing out of things you find lying around.
The entertainment value possible in consumer hardware that is produced with no profit motive whatsoever is pretty epic.
I imagine the potential of the arduino analog inputs means you could create some pretty novel interfaces for the games (i.e. beyond joystick and buttons)
