An Open Source Game Console

Howdy, folks!

I’ve finally managed to get (somewhat) settled into my new place in Oregon, so now it’s time to update the blog!

I’ve been following several Open Source hardware projects over the last few months (it’s easy to find free time during the pandemic… who knew?) and one of the most promising (and interesting!) I’ve seen is the “Icestation-32” console, which is an attempt to recreate 16-bit era graphics on an FPGA.

The benefit of using an FPGA rather than an embedded microcontroller-class chip is having the flexibility to improve upon a design as time goes on. This provides significantly more flexibility than having to substitute a entire component as your project becomes more complex.

The Open Source hardware project currently targets iCE40 and ECP5 boards which each have an Open Source toolchain to assist with deployment on the board of your choosing. Need I also mention that the CPU driving the game console is RISC-V based? 🙂

If you are interested in getting into game development, AND you happen to have an itch to explore what’s “under the hood” of a game console, I wholeheartedly recommend taking a look at this repository and getting familiar with its internals. You never know what form inspiration may take, eh?

Until next time!

Cheers! 🙂

A RISC’y Proposition

Hey, hey, hey! 🙂

As you may already know, I’m a big proponent of Free/Libre Open-Source Hardware, and I came across this video while doing some prep work for the 4th RISC-V Workshop that will be going on next week. It (the video) encompasses a lot of my personal feelings about free hardware and also serves as a good introduction to the RISC-V Open-Source ISA. If you’ve got an hour to spare, I recommend you check it out.

There will probably be a lapse in updates due to my being out of town, but I’ll try to post some details of the event proceedings once I get back from Boston.

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In other news, I’ve started tinkering with a Rust-based game engine called “Piston“. It basically takes the component architecture idea I did with my “from scratch” engine and translates it into Rust (through the utilization of dependencies like OpenGL, SDL2, etc.), so I’m feeling pretty optimistic about it. Plus, it gives me time to focus more on game design and asset creation, which would be a welcome change. 😛

I’m also experimenting with Elixir and functional programming in order to add those two skills to my tool belt. We’ll see how that goes.

As always, don’t hesitate to comment or reach out if you have any questions/feedback.

Cheers! 🙂

Things to Look Forward To: 2016

Hey hey hey!

So, after a nice holiday (and taking care of some personal business), I’ve figured out what I’d like to get done for this year:

1. I’ve returned back to my “from scratch” game engine, and, now that Apple has open-sourced their Swift programming language, I’d like to figure out how to create C-bindings for my C++ components. The reason for doing so is so that they can be brought into Swift natively at that point. Should this experiment work, I’m going to write some articles describing this process for the benefit of the community.
2. I want to learn more about Verilog and start implementing a RISC-V based, highly-parallelized GPU onto an FPGA. There are already plenty of individuals/groups out there trying to create various CPU implementations that utilize the RISC-V open-source ISA. Creating an open GPU would add some modular dynamics to the RISC-V landscape and allow people to integrate my GPU with their CPU, regardless of its design.

I hope all of you reading this have had a great holiday! Thanks for your continued support.

Cheers! 🙂