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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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  • 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!

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  • 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!

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  • 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.