We’ve seen our fair share of AVR projects, but this one’s pretty cool. AVGA is a color video game development platform based on the Atmel AVR family of microcontrollers. As seen in the picture above, one of the AVRs that the project uses is the popular ATMega168. There were several technical hurdles to using the AVRs to run color video games; one of the most difficult problems was figuring out a way to display detailed graphics from AVRs limited onboard RAM. Eventually, the developers figured out a way to display detailed graphics using a TILE-based driver. The TILE driver works by dividing the screen into X and Y coordinates, dividing the graphics into tiles. Then, when a graphic is needed it’s addressed from a reference table that’s stored in the AVR’s onboard RAM, allowing the bitmap graphic to be loaded from a game’s ROM. Currently, the only games available for the platform are a Super Mario clone, a Pacman clone, and a Snake clone. While there are only a few games available, the platform definitely looks promising. If anything, this project serves as a great example for what off the shelf microcontrollers are capable of.
16 thoughts on “AVGA: The AVR Based Video Game Platform”
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daaaang you guys killed their website!
samurai, How? and what?
The system is down! The system is down!!
slashdot effect. can’t access the website now, but it will be interesting to see how they load external code.
goddamnit hackaday.
the system is old… nothing new.
Amazing!!!
You shouldn’t hotlink images.
I’m guessing the site was hosted on the same AVR?
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Really cool. I might build one someday.
Hi Nick Caiello,
Thanks for sharing nice information about AVGA: The AVR based video game platform.i really like this information.
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this is awesome. i’ve been playing around with the parallax propeller recently just for it’s vidoe capability, but have much more avr exerpience. def gonna check this out.
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That is so cool, but isn’t this pretty much just an Uzebox without the ntsc encoder chip? (IE half-baked)http://www.belogic.com/uzebox/index.htm
So maybe it isn’t the same thing at all, nevermind.
HIS WEBSITE!!! IS DOWN!!! COME ON…!!
NOOOOOOO
Hate to leave such a short comment but I really enjoyed reading this !