Say you wanted to build a games machine with an Arduino at its core, you’d might be a trifle stuck with a stock Arduino. You could do a lot of the interfacing to controllers or the logic, but what about the display and sound. Well, previously you may have got a Gameduino which gave you 400x300 512 colour VGA output, hardware sprites and audio in a nifty Arduino shield. It is pure 8 bit epicness.
But that was back in 2011 and now the sequel is being kickstarted, Gameduino 2, and its a little cracker. With a smarter graphics engine, the FT800, it handles full 32 bit colour, JPEG loading in hardware and has what is described as an “OpenGL” style command set. Now it displays 480x272 in 24 bit colour and can handle 2000 sprites, rotated and scaled. It has 256KB of RAM and 6 sizes of font, 8 musical instruments and 10 percussion sounds already loaded into its ROM.
But where would you find a display for this device? As part of the Gameduino 2, there’s a 4.3" touchscreen so you have that display and control surface you need for a modern game. It also has a 3 axis accelerometer for orientation-oriented gaming, a headphone jack for audio out and a microSD slot. It basically looks splendid and may even be the missing link in getting more kids into Arduinos - show them this playing games, then take it apart and show them how they can take control. Did I mention how the hardware and software is all open source too (BSD licensed), so ripe for hacking!
I’ll admit I’ve already backed the project - it has passed its $6700 goal and still has 28 days of kickstarter time to go. Now, who’s going to make a handheld case and power kit for this beast.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog