Although VHS-based games have existed for about as long as VHS players have sat in millions of living rooms, they always tended to be rather sparse gaming experiences. For example, the ActionMax gaming “console” that [Throaty Mumbo] shows off in his most recent video. You use a zapper to purportedly shoot down on-screen targets in “games” like Sonic Fury. After this disappointing experience, he figured he should probably make his own interpretation of a VHS-based video game.
This involves a DE1-SoC FPGA board along with an RP2350 MCU. There’s also an in-progress GitHub repository for those who wish to follow along. Rather than the simplistic Action Max system that plays exactly the same every time along with a basic light gun feature, this actually allows for interactive gameplay.
The video shows that the VHS tape contains both binary data for the game, as well as a number of video streams. This is decoded using the DE1’s composite input, with the RP2350 then acting on the decoded game data and handling input from the controller. With this, interesting effects can be accomplished, such as background video streams for the original Super Mario Bros.
Other demos include Night Trap and a variant of Doom that uses prerecorded video segments along with action events requiring you to press a specific button. Since there’s actual bytecode involved, quite a few more options are available for game development that could have been interesting to a 1980s audience.
It is hard to imagine how hard it was to get the VCR into homes, only for it to vanish again.
Using a CRT oscilloscope in X-Y mode as a vector display, the console faithfully reproduces some classic games, most of which, curiously enough, were not originally vector games. There are implementations of the Anaconda, RetroRacer, and AstroLander minigames from Timesplitter 2. There are also versions of Pac-Man, Tetris, and even Super Mario Brothers. Most of the games were prototyped in JavaScript before being translated into assembly and placed onto EEPROM external cartridges, to be read by the ATMega128 inside the console. Sound and music are generated using the ATMega’s hardware timers, with a little help from a reverse-biased transistor for white noise and a few op-amps.
