Castlevania Meets Infinite Scrolling RGB LED Cube in Greig Stewart's Latest Project
What do you get if you combine six 64x64 LED panels, a lazy Susan, a Raspberry Pi and a love of eight-bit games? Castlevania on an LED cube.
Developer Greig Stewart has published a video of the classic eight-bit platformer Castlevania being played on an unusual display device: an LED cube which rotates to allow for infinite scrolling.
First released in 1986 and still receiving entries to this day, the gothic-themed Castlevania sees players exploring a labyrinthine castle while defeating ghouls and collecting power-ups which unlock additional areas. The game's most popular entries are two dimensional affairs, but none of them have ever been played in the same manner as in Stewart's video.
Stewart built his surprisingly large LED matrix cube back in September, assembling six Adafruit 64x64 RGB LED matrix panels into a single unit housing a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer in the middle. Initially, the his demonstrations were limited to simple patterns and animations — but he quickly happened upon a hack to unit the cube with his love of vintage gaming.
Combining the LED cube with a motorised lazy Susan, Stewart has been able to make it rotate according to the motion of the player character in Castlevania. As the character moves to the right, the cube rotates accordingly; move to the left again, and the cube rotates back. When the player sprite approaches the edge of a given display panel, it seamlessly moves onto the next — offering, in Stewart's terms, "infinite scrolling."
The choice of Castlevania is a smart one: the game sees the player spending a lot of time moving horizontally, and the eight-bit graphics map nicely to the relatively low-resolution 64x64 LED matrix panels. The effect in motion is truly impressive, too - though there is something of a hack involved: "I have [the lazy Susan] at a specific voltage to match the walk speed of the sprite," Stewart admits, with the voltage needing to be tweaked in order to correctly map to other games. Faster titles, too, can be a problem: Super Mario Bros works, Stewart explains, but the high movement speed is tricky.
Stewart hasn't yet published details of his build, but can be followed on Twitter for updates.
UPDATE: Stewart has now published a detailed write-up of the project on the element14 Community site.
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