Project Progress Summary
In this week, we have successfully finished the Interim Demo. We demonstrated the SyncNES system running both Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros in real-time on the Arty Z7-20 FPGA board. The system successfully managed single-player gameplay with full controller input and visual output.
Technically, we have achieved stable PPU mirroring, which allowed for correct rendering of side-scrolling titles. We also completed a significant refactor of the CPU and PPU codebases to ensure long-term timing stability. On the networking front, we worked on the UDP communication implementation and tested it using a Raspberry Pi 5 to simulate various network conditions, including latency and jitter spikes.
Risk & Management
The most significant risk currently is the integration of the UDP protocol into the RTL for active frame gating. While standalone network tests were successful, ensuring the hardware stalls exactly when a network packet is delayed is a high-precision task. To mitigate this, if frame gating introduces instability in the CPU/PPU interface, we will revert to a fixed-delay buffer of 5 frames.
Design Changes
There have been no changes to the existing system design.
Schedule
The project remains on schedule. We have met our Interim Demo milestone, and we are entering the final phase of development, which is the remote multiplayer functionality.