PIC18F familiy microcontroller based video game system.
The electronic system that is described in this document was created to demonstrate the possibility of developing an “old school” video game system, while using only microcontroller and a handful of passive electronic components. The system that this work produced was named the OSAgs, OSA game system, in reference to its underlying operating system. The OSAgs is a combination of hardware and graphical development environment meant to be intuitive development platform of arcade style computer games.
The code was written in C and assembly languages for the driver and API parts of the project and GML script (part of the freely available game maker software) and Java for the world editor.
The screenshots of an Example game that was created for demonstration purposes are shown bellow.
The general process of creating a game using the OSAgs can be illustrated using the following simplified diagram:
As shown above, the process starts with the game maker world editor which allows us to construct the game mechanics. After the game creation process is done, the game maker will automatically create all C and Assembly files needed for the game operation on the OSAgs, those files can then be written to the microcontroller ROM and executed without additional steps. After the system power up the game video signal will be transmitted to the monitor and the audio will be heard on the external speakers. When modification to the game is needed we can simply return to the game maker environment and repeat the steps described above.