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  • Author Author: kellyhensen
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FPGA "Game Genie" for Atari 2600 -- Episode 371

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FPGA "Game Genie" for Atari 2600

element14 presents  |  Andy West's VCP Profile |  Project Videos

 

The "Game Genie" line of cheat devices was released for several consoles back in the early 90s, but they never made one for the Atari 2600 since by that time it was obsolete. Andy travels travel back in time and uses an FPGA to build the video game accessory that never was.

 

 

Product Name Quantity
 Buy Kit

Terasic Technologies FPGA Dev Kit DEO-Nano, 2x GPIO Headers, 32MB RAM, Accelerometer

 1 Buy Now

24 Pin card edge connector

 1 Buy Now

 

Additional Parts:

 

Product Name Quantity

40-Pin GPIO Cable

 1
Atari 2600 2K/4K PC Board 1

 

Click Here for access to all the supporting files you will need to replicate this build!
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  • in reply to hizzy

    That sounds like a fun project, but it would be too much work to show in a single episode. Why not try it yourself if that's what interests you? You could start with something really small, like blinking an LED when a joystick button is pressed, and eventually move on to emulating the CPU and all the other components. I'm a big fan of this learn-as-you-go approach.

  • Hi Andy!

     

    Would you be able to show us how to build an FPGA Atari 2600?

     

    Love your videos!

     

    Thanks!!

  • in reply to Sean_Miller

    That's tricky because it sort of depends on how you learn. Some people like video tutorials. Others like being taught in a classroom. Still others, like myself, like books.

     

    I started by reading these two books:

     

    • Learning FPGAs: Digital Design for Beginners with Mojo and Lucid HDL
    • Programming FPGAs: Getting Started with Verilog

     

    I also read through the DE0-Nano user manual which is about 150 pages. Then I had enough knowledge under my belt at that point to make my own "blink" example.

     

    The Nano definitely isn't the newest board out there. I think it's a great board for learning, but it's also the only board I've ever used. I've got a Mojo V3 but I haven't gotten around to trying it yet.

     

    So my recommendation is:

     

    1. Think of a project you'd like to do with an FPGA. It could be anything.
    2. Do some online research to find development boards that are suitable to the task.
    3. Buy a board with the features, price, and ratings/reviews you're most happy with.
    4. Find educational materials that match your learning style (videos, instructional courses, books, etc.)
    5. Build it!

  • Andy, is there a good starting point you'd recommend for getting into programming FPGA's.  Would it be the board you have?  If so, do they have a "blink" example?

  • in reply to itrash

    Wooow! Very impressive video, thanks for sharing!

     

    Even if one's not so experienced, projects that incorporate things you like (even if it's just playing games) can be quite awesome for learning new stuff.

     

    Yes! The best way to learn is to just go for it. Also, the e14 community is extremely supportive and helpful.

  • Hi,

     

    just wanted to say that these kind of projects are really cool and I'm desperate to see more of that kind of stuff!

    I've personally done some hacking on my Nintendo DS to record video and audio. It took a few atempts to get the PCB right, to fix noise in the audio and to get stable video.

    Not so much retro as the Atari but was a cool project to learn a lot of stuff none the less.

     

    Here are some pictures if you're interested:

     

    https://images.romhackersworld.eu/album/3724-ds-video-capture-outside/

    https://images.romhackersworld.eu/album/3723-ds-video-capture-inside/

     

    Even if one's not so experienced, projects that incorporate things you like (even if it's just playing games) can be quite awesome for learning new stuff.

  • in reply to ramgarden

    Glad you enjoyed it! The Atari 2600 inspired me to learn programming as a kid, so this was a very satisfying project to work on.

     

    The NES Game Genie worked the same as my device in principle, but it also obfuscated the codes to make them seem more "magical". So it was harder for gamers to predict what a particular code would do, but sometimes random codes would yield interesting results.

     

    And yes, if you're looking for a code with a specific effect, it can be difficult to find. There are some tools that can help automate the search, but mostly I just compared pages and pages of captured RAM values, manually.

  • This is an AWESOME project!  I finally understand how my NES game genie worked.  I had a high level idea but didn't quite understand how the codes worked.  Now I see that it is split into two parts with an address and data portion it now all just came together in my head.

    I also now understand how much tedious work went into create the "book of codes" as people had to figure out what address was used for lives/hits/health/etc for every game individually!