This cool projects aims to take the various FPGA-based arcade platforms and run them on a common piece of hardware, thus letting you play many games and platforms without having tons of equipment sitting around.


I've written here about various FPGA arcade and emulator projects, such as the Minimig Amiga 500 project. All of these projects are using a hardware programming language like VHDL or Verilog to implement the circuitry of classic arcade and computer platforms on a regular, (relatively) cheap field programmable gate array (FPGA).

There is one project, though, which is attempting to create a single hardware platform that you can buy which will run many of these independent projects. Currently, the board is still in the design and debug phase, with only a few developers having them, but eventually, the FPGA Replay board will be offered as a pre-assembled unit which you can download the various games onto, or work on your own pet projects.

Currently, the games supported by the FPGA Replay include:

• Scramble
• Frogger
• Asteroids Deluxe
• Pac Man
• LadyBug
• Space Invaders
• Galaxian

I'll be keeping an eye on the progress of the FPGA Replay as I think this would be really fun to play around with, if only for the games. But, it could also be a challenging project to take one of my favorite games (like Robotron or Joust) and try to create the VHDL code to actually run it. I suppose that's something to add to my ever-growing list of "long term to-do" projects