The Papilio Arcade kit is meant to accurately recreate classic arcade games on a low-cost, modular, and Open Source FPGA board called the Papilio One. Its VGA, stereo audio, and joystick ports provide all the basic building blocks needed to recreate classic arcade games. Additionally, it is easy to add new features such as SVideo, extra joysticks, MicroSD cards, and wireless controllers through the use of  "Wing" adapters.

There are several really exciting Open Source FPGA based arcade projects out there that can be supported by the Papilio Arcade kit.  The Papilio Arcade kit aims to be a low cost hardware kit that can consolidate all of the available projects onto a common hardware platform. Many of the existing projects are not seeing a wide audience because they are targeted for either expensive hardware, obscure dev kits, a design that is not being manufactured, or cannot be expanded. The benefit of the Papilio Arcade kit is that it is low cost, Open Source, readily available, and expandable with the Wings concept. Below are some links to the cool Open Source Arcade projects that should be able to run on the Papilio Arcade kit:

• NES on an FPGA - This is a really cool project that is targeted for an expensive development kit. The Papilio One Arcade kit would be a great low cost hardware option for this project.
• Atari 2600 on FPGA - Awesome! A full Atari 2600 on an FPGA, this design actually includes a hardware design with it but it is not clear if the author is interested in manufacturing this hardware. The Papilio One is readily available and offers easy expandability.
• Classic Arcade Games - No list is complete without the awesome work that MikeJ has done over at FPGA Arcade, he has completed several arcade games. He is working on a very a very high end piece of hardware to support his designs, but the cost is going to be very high. The Papilio Arcade kit can provide a lower cost option for a wider audience.
• Uzebox - The ultra cool Uzebox project brings a ton of games and an easy to use environment to make your own games. Just like it was possible to implement an AVR compatible soft processor that supports Arduino sketches, it is very conceivable to adapt a FPGA soft processor that we can port the entire Uzebox project to. We can even make it more powerful to eliminate the current limitations of the Uzebox hardware. Maybe Papilio Arcade kit would be a good hardware upgrade path for the Uzebox.

What is special about using an FPGA to recreate arcade games is that FPGAs allow all of the circuitry of original arcade game motherboards to be shrunk down to a single chip! All of the original digital circuitry can be accurately recreated using a HDL (Hardware Description Language) such as VHDL or Verilog. The best part is that all of the code is Open Source so you can download the project and start experimenting, simulating, and learning how this classic Arcade hardware works without being an FGPA expert. The projects are ready to be downloaded and synthesized for the Papilio One right now!

Requirements

Please Note: The Pac-Man code currently works with the Open Source Papilio One 500K FPGA dev board. At this time the Papilio One 250K board is not supported, it may be possible to cut down the memory usage of the Pac-Man game to make it fit within the Papilio One 250K.

Downloads