It's finally time to post my entry for the summer building contest. This is an idea that has been on my mind for years and I have finally decided to start working on it. I have always wanted to make an FPGA based 2D videogame console. This has nothing to do with MiSTer or any other FPGA reimplementations of retro consoles, but it is a fully custom console designed from scratch.
Technical specs:
-3.5" 640x480 IPS LCD
-25k LUT ECP5 FPGA
-RISC-V soft-core running on the FPGA
-2x 16MB SRAM (one used as VRAM chip)
-LM49450 for digital audio with stereo speakers
-MicroSD for bitstream and software loading
I'm still unsure about what the graphics capabilities goals are going to be, but I would like to be able to allow at least multiple (100+) sprites rendering with affine transformation (translation+rotation+scaling) and also tile-based backgrounds with at least translation transformation.
The project is a big WIP, will require a lot of work and will probably be incomplete by the time the contest ends, but I'll keep working on it. As soon as I will have something consistent to show, I will release it on Github for anyone wanting to recreate it or develop on it.
