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Tiny Tapeout VGA Playground (tinytapeout.github.io)
139 points by lnyan 3 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments



This looks really cool!

A nitpick: the Verilog simulation seems to be handled by the open-source Verilator project, which is packaged as a binary WASM blob without any acknowledgement or source code. I don't think that's compliant with either of the licenses under which Verilator is distributed (LGPL-3.0 or Artistic License).

https://github.com/verilator/verilator


There is a link to the source code of the whole vga playground in the top right of the screen.


That's what I was looking at and what prompted me to comment. That repository contains a binary blob (src/verilator/verilator_bin.wasm) without any corresponding source code.


if you like this sort of stuff, tiny tapeout is running a demo competition. i hope we will see some interesting entries there

https://tinytapeout.com/competitions/demoscene/


There were 32 entries in the competition. The actual competition won't be run until May 2025 or so when the chips are back, but there are already videos of a few of the contributions captured from FPGA or simulation:

Drop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJBU0J2ceMM

Warp: https://youtu.be/mLHro21KDLE

Sequential Shadows: https://youtu.be/pkiTu3iLA_U (version that adheres to the rules starts at 3:08)

Demo by a1k0n https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms


For those wondering: Opportunity for new submissions closed Sept. 6th apparently...

  > 2. Will there be any extension to the deadline? No, it’s September 6th.

  > 4. When will the competition be judged? 2 weeks after 75% of the boards have been received by entrants (estimated June 2025).


This is awesome, and I really want to learn enough verilog to do a tiny tape out VGA chip design.

But man, 8bitworkshop really burned me out on trying to do verilog in a web IDE, and trying to set up verilator properly for local simulation with a proper IDE became such a hassle.

Ended up moving away from verilog for the moment back to normal software projects. I really want to get back in, but I really don't want to spend my limited coding time fighting IDEs and tooling.


Welcome to Hardware Design! The open-source toolchains come from hell. The closed-source options are supremely expensive and not much better

They don't call it EasyWare


Try SpinalHDL or Chisel and never look back.


I was worrying about debuggability if I started with a higher level Verilog transpiler and didn't have a good foundation of Verilog experience.

But maybe I should just do it.


a cheap FPGA kit is the best way to start learning IMHO.

Xilinx (now AMD) and Altera (now Intel) free tools are quite good.


Cool. Reminds me of a course project I did 12 years ago (bacholers..) on an FPGA [1]. I used the ADC on the FPGA board to read the line input audio signal, implemted a VGA driver and a VU meter, implemented a 32-bin FFT to create the VU Meter inputs, and finally implemented a 1 bit delta-sigma modulator to drive a speaker to create the audio back. All in Verilog, on a 100$ FPGA board (Spartan 3 FWIW) in 2 weeks. Good times..

[1] Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3hphFfxZMQ


Neat. The example code that makes the cool patterns is here: https://github.com/TinyTapeout/vga-playground/tree/main/src/...


It's also in the text editor next to the image, which is editable and affects the image. :)

(There's also one bit of shared code in: https://github.com/TinyTapeout/vga-playground/blob/main/src/...)


This looks like a really fun way to experiment while learning Verilog!




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