Project Progress Summary
This week, our team moved into the integrated testing phase. We hit a major milestone with the completion of the hardware controller interface. Now, our processing system can read real-time button states from the controller. On the rendering side, we have implemented a visual debug overlay that provides a view of palette RAM and internal PPU registers, which is very valuable for debugging the PPU’s MMIO interface. We also initiated the audio processing unit (APU) development.
We also dedicated some effort on the ethics assignment. Beyond the individual assignments, our team met together and had a discussion regarding the worst case scenario for our product. We followed this with a breakout session during the ethics lecture where we engaged in a red teamming exercise.
Significant Risks & Management
The most significant risk at this stage is network jitter and latency within our remote syncing protocol. As we begin sending controller signals via UDP, any inconsistent packet arrival could cause the local and remote game states to diverge. To mitigate this, we are implementing a frame gating logic that will stall the emulated world if required inputs from the network have not arrived.
Design Changes
We have made no design changes in the past week.
Schedule
Our project remains on schedule. We are now transitioning to verification of full-system synchronization. Our goal for the next few weeks will be a completed one FPGA imlementation of the NES for the interim demo.