Graphics demo using FPGA?

Hi. Just interesting, does anybody used FPGA to produce real-time graphics effects, in the spirit of demoscene?

I did a realtime fractal, but it is only a simple screen not a full demo. The fractal is calculated in realtime with the electron ray of the monitor (60Hz thus correspond to 60fps).

www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~alles/fpga

I think doing a full featured 3D-Engine (with texturing, z-buffering, backface-culling, clipping) in an FPGA would be really nice but also a LOT of work. Some years ago I coded one on a DSP56001 that is used in the Atari Falcon030 and even that was quite a lot of work (I think about 3000 lines of assembler code - gives only a 9KB binary!)

Matthias

Dennis Yurichev schrieb:

Celoxica used to have a raytracing demo which ran without a frame buffer, calculating pixels on the fly.

It displayed a rotating Venus de Milo statue in the middle of a room. The room also rotated and had live video from a camera feed mapped onto it. As I recall, the statue was reflective as well.

This was years ago, it ran on (IIRC) a spartan II(E?) of about 400k marketing-gates...

Cheers, Martin

demoscene?

Hi Dennis,

I've given it some though and I think there is a great potienial to start with a basic spec. card (3-bit VGA + so called Space Invaders Sound) and from there construct Demos for different max sizes for FPGA's. I've been fooling around with basic tests with virtual-colors (4096+ colors on-screen out of 3-bit VGA), FPGA-synths and simple vector- engine and from there everything is possible. It would be nice if it was possible to choose a specific card (my suggestion of it is Xilinx Spartan-3 Starter Kit possibly 200 and 100K variants) but maybe it is possible to make it even wider. Maybe different classes with different MAX Slices/BRAM or something like that!

It would be interesting to hear how many people that would be interested in this? Count me in! I'm just a newbie but it would be great to see what others could do!

Another very interesing subject would be FPGA-MAME! Somebody had the same thoughs? Already there are versions with PacMan, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pengo and others. just think of the possiblities with Partial Reconfiguration of that was more every-mans business. Today it seem very resource-expensive and hard to do. But maybe the recent updates in ISE 9.1 with Partitions could be used to make Partial Reconfiguration more "open".

Or maybe a FPGA-MESS would be even more interesing! Well what do think?

/Magnus

demoscene?

While I have not personally done it, I have seen it done on an Altera FPGA. I think I saw a demo that was able to combine the alpha blending mixer megacore (from the VIP suite) with a controller in NIOS to create real time graphics effect.

I think that's a stupid idea! ;)

Note: no downloads there yet...

Regards,

Of all sites I've been to I've actually missed that one... :-) Of course, someone has already thought of it. Sorry to see that the site hasn't got more attention. A prime start of such a mission is to base the main branch work on a cheap and capable board and offer (sell) upgrades so that anyone can get their hands on working key- hardware cheaply and simple. After that, I think there might be a possiblity to build a small Community of Gamers/Testers/Enthusiasts that could attract even more implementers to add man hours in implementing new "circuits". And yes I'm just looking into a suitable add-on board for my FPGA-card..

I still like my thoughts of using Partial Reconfiguration... maybe it's not a "better" solution but more interesting. But of course maybe it would be good enough to be able to do RAM/ROM- insertion-changes into already pre-compiled bitstreams to be able to play all games on a particular Arcade platform. That would demand that ALL different Arcade platforms had pre-compiled bitstreams.

A cooler solution would be to have a main FPGA-MAME framework as a static partial reconfguration block, that care for both instanciating the blocks neeeded for a particular platform and also injects tha ROM/ RAM needed for that platform. The end result would be a generic hardware-platform, that would have big similarities with the current software-based MAME. For some logical circuits included in the MAME- community maybe the most gate-economical way of implementing it would be to spawn a small microcontroller and just use the c sourcecode from MAME compiling it for that particular microcontroller ... :-)

Sorry to mumble about MAME and MESS in a thread that asked for a demo- scene.. back to the original question. YES there could really be a demoscene in the FPGA-world! It would be GREAT!

/M

There are already lot's of projects in this area. It's been thought of :) I know there's specific projects for Atari-ST, Amiga, C64, Amstrad etc.. (thoe Amiga is proberbly the more challenging one)

Search for C-one etc.

Yep, thanks for the tip but I've already read and had some talks with both the SUSKA-implementor, the Minimig implementor, read about the nice C64DTV-project and underlying C-one with its Amstrad and others- implementation. I talked some with the original implementor of the new C64-core for C-one before he teamed up with (or jumped over too) C- one. There are also a great Apple2-project guy who I had alot of disscussion with and who's project works great. A TRS-80 project what works great, the great System09 There are complete ZX Spectrum's out there ready for donwload into your nearest FPGA-card. These projects are for complete and static platforms. So with lots of the above project's source code available there are a goldmine for the persons whom have the time to pursue a future multi- platform-project. The above persons work is of course a well needed starting-point!