We’ve seen FPGAs used to recreate everything from classic arcade games to ancient computers, but with each of these builds a common problem arises. Once you’ve got the hardware emulated on an FPGA, you’ve also got to get the ROMs into the project as well. In a very interesting hack, [Mike] figured out that the serial Flash chip that stores the FPGA settings has a lot of space free, so why not store user data there?
[Mike] got the idea from seeing a recreation of the classic BombJack arcade game we featured last month. In that build, [Alex] needed to store 112Kb of game data stored in 16 ROM chips. Unfortunately, [Alex]’s FPGA only had space for 40Kb of data. After realizing his FPGA had a 512Kb SRAM chip, [Alex] decided to put all the sprites, sounds, and levels of BombJack in the SRAM.
Impressed with [Alex]’s build, [Mike] set to work generalizing the hack to work with other projects. [Mike] notes that only a few FPGA boards are capable of storing user data next to the configuration bitstream; the hack is impossible on the Digilent Basys2 board, but it works wonderfully on a Papilio One 250K.
As a very cool build that makes FPGA-related builds even easier, we’ve got to tip our hat to [Mike] for writing up a great tutorial.
