FPGA Used for Playing SNES Starfox Game

Overview

The project illustrates the implementation of Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game on FPGA where a 320x240 pixel VGA is used to output the image.

Details

The concept of the project originates from the classic game Starfox on the SNES which was one of the first games to display 3D models. A script is used by the implementation to generate the vertex list where the 3D models are drawn in Matlab. The software includes the vertex list as a header file while the 3D world coordinates to the hardware by the software running the NIOS CPU. Using the matrix arithmetic, the 3D world coordinates are transformed by the hardware to 2D screen coordinates. To give impression of movement for the ship, the NIOS console takes input from the keyboard and redraws the screen coordinate changes.

The pairs of points from the software are read by the hardware as it transform them from the world coordinate system to the VGA screen coordinate system in 320x240 pixel resolution. A state machine in verilog takes care of the actual work on the hardware end. The user interface was also implemented in software using the NIOS.