Project Reports

An adversarial, 4 player version of the classic Nintendo game. Modeled after Super Bomberman 2. Used SDL graphics. Got both Power PCs on a Virtex 2 Pro board working, plus a fair number of hardware modules running on the OPB -- including a custom framebuffer.

Every Extend was a popular freeware game, since moved to the PSP (and updated to become "Every Extend Extra"). This group implemented it on the PowerPC, with hardware for supporting sound, video, random number generation, etc.

The first attempt at making an OpenGL Acclerator -- a device which would input instructions in the standard OpenGL language and output images to the monitor. In theory, such a device could be used for many games, as OpenGL is pretty common. This team built what they believe to be an architecturally complete version of the accelerator. Unfortunately, it wouldn't synthesize into anything that would fit on the Virtex II Pro board.

The first attempt at making the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), an 8-bit console from the mid 1980s. Unfortunately, the team was unsuccessful.

This team ramped-up the classic PacMan game by making it a first-person, virtual reality game An OpenGL workstation interfaces with a virtual-reality helmet. The PowerPC on the Virtex II Pro board interfaces with a custom built chair (which acts as a PS2 mouse as the person leans back and forth), updates game state, runs the ghost AI, and then sends data to the OpenGL workstation for a VR helmet render.

This team ported the open-source version of Guitar Hero, "Frets on Fire", to the Virtex II Pro board. They interfaced the guitar controller via a PS2 adapter. They also ported 3 songs and made the audio hardware to play each song.

A second attempt at building the NES. Unfortunately, this team didn't get a working system. Note that their report is filled with information, but isn't necessarily all that useful as it doesn't have much description of how that information fits together, how the team used it, nor how it actually works.

A fully-playable port of Quake, including networked multiplayer support for LAN play. Game sounds are mixed and rendered with the AC97 codec. A pretty impressive, completely successful, project.

Finally, success on the NES front. This was a pretty incredible team that really worked well together, contributing hugely to their success. They eschewed the Virtex II Pro's PowerPC entirely, building a 6502 processor, the Pixel Processing Unit (a very basic GPU), an audio processing unit and a DMA manager. For their effort, this team won the David Tuma Award for the best undergraduate project of the year.

This team got the original Descent game working on the Virtex II Pro board. They ported code to the PowerPC, built a framebuffer and added audio support. The result was a very playable version.

This team built a custom version of asteroids, using the Wii remote for input. The Wiimote used Bluetooth to communicate with a Linux laptop, which transmitted the input messages over Ethernet to the Virtex II Pro board.

This team, like the F08 XilRoids team, aimed to get the wiimote working. They also had to do an end-around by sending the wiimote bluetooth signals through an intermediary computer. The duckhunt game was re-coded and worked fairly well.

This team attempted to get the GameBoy Color console working, including link cable for multi-player capability. They had to back off to the Original GameBoy (monochrome) and were able to get Tetris "sort-of" running without sound or link cable.

This team worked on a console that emulates multiple arcade games built by the Williams company, a style commercially known (and sold) as "MultiWilliams". The single system would then support 4 classic arcade games: Joust, Robotron, Stargate and Defender. They built a very nice input system with arcade quality hardware (joystick, buttons, etc) which is available for new teams.

This project attempted to build the OpenGL accelerator -- to render images specified using the OpenGL language. Unfortunately, the final attempt was less than successful, with a very slow frame rate.

Using the new Virtex-5 boards, this team had a speedy enough processor to port Quake II, on top of a commercial Linux distribution (LinuxLink). They were working on a hardware matrix pipeline when they ran out of time.

This team attempted a research project (as opposed to a game project) for Prof Ken Mai. The project was to build a Solid State Disk Drive. They laid out and had constructed a DIMM with flash chips on it. They then used a microblaze processor on a Virtex-5 board to develop the flash controller. They got some form of PCIE communication going between the host processor and the FPGA board, but did not get the entire project completed.

This team also attempted the SSD drive project for Ken Mai. They got some very basic communication going with the flash chips, but the controller did not do most of the management algorithms. This group's project report is very good, with lots of good words of wisdom -- even for those not doing SSD projects.

Another attempt at the OpenGL Accelerator GPU. This team got further than any previous, though still not what anyone would call an acceptable GPU. Their pipeline worked, with small triangle-count objects getting drawn with decent framerate. However, the z-buffer didn't work and so had to be turned off for the final demo. No attempt was made to get a shader working.

This group did something very interesting (and quite legal) -- they got a synthesizable Verilog description from the company that originally manufactured the CPU. With monor modifications, it was ready to go. Unfortunately, this group fell victim to the "not enough time to integrate" monster and ended up with separate descriptions of the system's chips. Without integrating the chips together, however, they did not have a complete system to demonstrate.

This group wanted 18-545 to integrate well with 18-447, Computer Architecture. Therefore, they focused on the designing an ARM-like CPU and then ported a small musical rhythm game to it. This was the most successful project of the F10 semester.

Doom is perhaps the primary antecedent for today's first-person shooter games. This group ported it to the MicroBlaze processor on the V5-LX100T board. They did not get the networking aspects or background sounds working, but otherwise it was a successful project.

The Commodore 64 was a very, very, extremely popular and best-selling personal computer of the pre-Wintel age. This group built the C64 in hardware. They got 5 different games running (for some definitions of the word running). They also got the Basic Interpreter running, so programming the chip in the BASIC language is possible. This was a very successful project.

This group attempted to build a complete computer system in Verilog, including lots of the computer architecture and OS issues. The computer is a MIPS architecture and is capable of running MIPS machine language and interacting with several peripheral devices. The group wrote a C implementation of the classic Duck Hunt game. Unfortunately, the OS kernel was incomplete and thus never actually executed the game. Beware of attempting too much.