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Show HN: Tamagotchi P1 for FPGAs

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71 pointsagg2311 comments

After being thrust headfirst into FPGA development thanks to the Analogue Pocket, my first from scratch creation was a gate level implementation of the original Tamagotchi toy.

The core, running on both the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer platforms, lets users re-experience the very first Tamagotchi from 1996 with accurate emulation, but modern features. The core has savestates (which is much harder to do in hardware vs software emulation), high turbo speeds (1,800x was the max clock speed I've reached so far), and more.

Learning more about hardware and FPGAs is something I've wanted to do for many years, and I highly recommend it for any programmer-brained person. It's a very slightly different way of thinking that has vast consequences on how you look at simple problems.

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Very nice project. Playing with FPGAs can be difficult, but also a lot of fun.

Must say the code was nicely organized and easy to follow. My own code is a bit of a mess in comparison.

Did you try out plain Verilog before going with System Verilog? My plan was to move on to generators like nMigen, now called Amaranth[1], and they spit out Verilog IIRC so decided to learn that for debugging.

Then life happened and got sidetracked, but been wanting to pick it up again.

How was it to program for the Analogue Pocket? I was recently looking at it as just a portable retro gaming device, but if it's easy to double as a fun FPGA platform then that would be great.

[1]: https://github.com/amaranth-lang/amaranth

I wrote my first project in VHDL (https://github.com/agg23/openfpga-pong) due to the type safety, then learned that the US (and Analogue team) primarily use Verilog, so I switched. I don't use many System Verilog features, but I saw no need to use older versions unnecessarily.

I've talked to the Amaranth people. I'm not incredibly interested in using real programming languages to write HDL, but I think I like keeping programming and hardware separate in some ways.

The Analogue Pocket is fantastic for getting started with FPGAs because everything you need is built into the device and it's not "too" expensive. You do lack Pmods. There is the fully open source Game Bub (https://www.crowdsupply.com/second-bedroom/game-bub) as a cool new platform to target, but it will have orders of magnitude fewer users than the Pocket. NOTE: I am extremely biased about the Pocket; I have a working relationship with Analogue and own the main platform ports to the Pocket (for example NES, SNES, and many more).

Man, I'm kicking myself for not having a backup, but there was this game programming contest around early 2000s where they had to make a game in a day or less.

It was either hosted by flipcode[1] or linked to from there.

One of the entries was a faithful reimplementation of Tamagotchi for Windows, except instead of a small creature to look after it was a small rock, and the game was called Tamagraniti (I'm pretty sure).

You could do all the same things, water your rock, give it a pet pebble and such.

I just really loved the silliness of it, and the implementation was really well done in that it mimicked the little device with the LCD screen.

Been trying to find it but seems gone...

[1] https://www.flipcode.com

Great stuff. Reminds me of some of my favorite CCC talks about reverse-engineering tamagotchis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4PkcZScBV8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbTgDfB0cao

Very cool project!

Anything surprise you about working on this? Any tips you found about implementing for FPGA?

As someone with no hardware experience, I find working with HDLs to be a very different environment and potentially hard to reason with. I did my best to document things from a software perspective (particularly for the Analogue Pocket) (https://github.com/agg23/analogue-pocket-utils/wiki). My code is also running in some capacity in most of the main core ports to the Pocket.

That's insanely cool! I love fun applications of FPGA like this.

1800x turbo?

What happens if you fast-forward a whole lot, any easter eggs?

That ends up not actually being that fast. The real goal was to be able to wake the Pocket/Tamagotchi core and have it automatically fast forward time as if the device was running that whole time. But when the FPGA fabric (and my design) limits us to 1800x, that means we get a whopping 30 minutes of sim time per every 1 second of real time. So even if you slept the device for a day, it's unreasonable to wait for it to fast forward.

Nothing special happens when fast forwarding, other than you can kill your Tamagotchi very quickly :P

This is awesome, nice work!

Now I finally have an incentive to buy an Analogue Pocket. Nice work and really great idea for a project!

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