Jeshua's Life

Yesterday my group demoed our Pretendo Entertainment System. This was the final project for my Senior Design lab, and was probably the most fun and the hardest project I've had in school. We used an FPGA board (a computer board with a reprogrammable CPU chip, for those of you who aren't engineers) to create our own CPU and video processor, and then wrote games that run on that processor. I took some videos with my camera (I'll post them when I'm done with my project for my other class - it's due Sat.), but until then you can look at some pictures one of my teammates took. The guy who took them wrote most of our software, including the assembler, graphics loader, Virtual Tennis 2006 (aka pong), and Space Invaders. I wrote PretendoWorks (a basic word processor) and did a majority of the work on the video processor. I started writing DDR (DanceDanceRevolution), but didn't get it done in time for the demo :(

PretendoWorks has a secret button code that would run whatever software (usually pong or invaders) had been running on the board before PW was loaded, which was fun. I think in the end that's what some people on our team liked the best, which makes the long hours I spent on it all worth it.

All in all, my only regret is that we ran out of time to complete some other games. One guy was doing Hangman, one was doing Space War, and I was doing DDR. We would have had time had the lab equipment not been so horrible ... grrrr.