Mario Display

 

 

Introduction

 

Our goal was to create a simple gaming system. The system uses a black and white LCD display, a nintendo 8 controller for input, and a single computer speaker for sound. To demonstrate the system we created a sidescroller mario game.

 

 

 

   MPC 823 Board

Nintendo 8 Controller

Speaker

 

LCD Graphics Display

input

Output

 

Results of the Design:

 

The only problem with the design is the load on the CPU. In cases where a lot of characters are on screen at once the frame rate takes an unacceptable hit. At first we used a timer to control the frame rate, but because of the CPU struggles to keep the frame rate up we dropped the timer so the game could update as fast as possible. One way to fix the speed problem would be to move some of the graphics processing off the CPU and onto specialized display hardware.

 

Despite this problem we were able to make the game run smoothly by keeping a limit on the amount of drawing.

 

 

Conclusions:

 

Overall the system worked as expected. The controller was responsive and the display was able to refresh fast enough to allow real time graphics. More processing power would be necessary if we wanted to create more complicated games and keep the frame rate up.

High Level Design

Members:

Sean Petty

Michael Pamphlet