FPGA Hardware Arcade Game Proves You Don’t Always Need an Arduino

Modern video games have us all pretty spoiled—so much so that playing retro video games from just 20 or 30 years ago is treated as a novelty by most people. But, even the Atari 2600 was capable of a resolution of 160x192 pixels, and a palette of up to 128 colors.

By most of our standards, Atari 2600 games are pretty crude, so how could you possibly build something fun with just a resolution of 5x11 pixels? The answer is: by following LumoW’s tutorial to build an addicting game called Stack Overflow. The mechanics of the game itself are very simple: you’re given a series of increasingly smaller blocks, and you must push a button at the correct time to stack them neatly on top of each other.

But Stack Overflow doesn’t use any fancy high-resolution displays. Instead, it’s built from 55 addressable RGB LEDs laid out in a grid. Those are controlled by a Mojo FPGA board—though you could also use a microcontroller like an Arduino, or a single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi. The LEDs are separated into a grid with wood and foam, and acrylic panes are used to diffuse their light.

From a maker standpoint, the use of an FPGA makes this project particularly interesting. It meant that LumoW and his partners couldn’t just use one of the multitude of available Arduino libraries out there—instead they had to do some light reverse engineering with an oscilloscope to get the job done. The result is a fun game that would be a perfect weekend project for those of you looking to get started with FPGA boards.