Uzebox video player

Everyone’s favorite open source game console, the Uzebox (also cloned as the Fuzebox), just got a new feature hacked into it – a video player. At reduced quality (8-bit color), the Uzebox was able to play ‘The Matrix’ off an SD card @ 30fps plus the audio @15kHz. That’s a pretty impressive feat when one considers it is running on 4096 bytes of RAM. The video file had to first be converted into a series of pictures through a Photoshop macro in order to be playable. A Uzebox can be built with little more than a few resistors in addition to an overclocked ATmega644P, and AD725 (which has been skirted in certain incarnations).

Comments [12]

tagged: atmega, AVR, fuzebox, matrix, s-video, uzebox

12 Responses to Uzebox video player

emperor says:

September 10, 2009 at 9:55 am

That is the most amazing thing ive seen an avr do yet.

Very nice use of the AD725.

wonderful work
-Dane

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ino says:

September 10, 2009 at 12:36 pm

That’s some amazing work !

Congrats

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samurai says:

September 10, 2009 at 1:46 pm

I think the most amazing thing about this was that the were able to source SNES controller connectors… WTF?

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DanAdamKOF says:

September 10, 2009 at 3:06 pm

I’m not trying to critique you at all emperor, but is the AD725 being used in any sort of unusual way in this, or is is just doing like it always does and converting RGB to Composite and S-Video signals?

Just wondering if I’m missing something or not.

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Uze says:

September 10, 2009 at 9:53 pm

Hey guys, thanks for the nice comments. The AD725 does just what it’s supposed to be doing…converting RGB voltages to NTSC, no more no less! All the rest is generated purely by software.

Those SNES connectors have actually been painstakingly stripped-off SNES multitaps made in Hong-Kong about 12-15 years ago! Ladyada and Embedded Engineering (who made the Uzebox AVCore) literally dried out the market of all the surplus! Interestingly, these connectors were very high quality…

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Pilotgeek says:

September 10, 2009 at 10:03 pm

@DanAdamKOF
What’s amazing is that they got an ATmega with 4096 BYTES of ram to decode and play video off an SD card.

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spacecoyote17 says:

September 10, 2009 at 11:39 pm

db9 would be a good replacement for the SNES connectors; it was used by several systems from atari, sega, and commodore, as well as the colecovision and intellivision.

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DanAdamKOF says:

September 10, 2009 at 11:53 pm

Pilotgeek I am fully aware of that lol, it just seemed to me that emperor was really impressed with an IC that does its job like it always does (no offense meant).

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strider_mt2k says:

September 11, 2009 at 5:08 am

I agree w/db9 as an alternative.

db connectors are just so darn handy. (and as mentioned occasionally used anyway!)

It seems to me that some dead controllers would render the cable ends for some easily wired-up adapters with a little looking around as well.

Very very cool stuff here. :)

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cantido says:

September 11, 2009 at 11:41 am

Why not DB15 ala Neogeo? with a DB9 you need tricks (encoders etc) to get lots of buttons wired up.

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