The Project Selection Process Pt.3

Continued from Part 2.

I am sure at this point all of you are glued to your monitors in anticipation of what my project will be. At this point I was only 2 weeks out from the due date, so I decided to look over the options for lab ideas presented in the document for the final project. Most of the ideas were for simple games, all of which would be displayed on an 8x8 LED matrix. Things like frogger, flappy bird, guitar hero, etc. But amongst the crowd was a suggestion of Conway's Game of Life. In one of my programming classes we had made a version of the Game of Life and it was a good time. Also, if you had noticed, both of my previous ideas involved the real time analysis of information and loosely the Game of Life does as well, with the input being the previous output of the system.

Even though I was picking one of the projects listed in the lab document, I was already planning on expanding the scope of the project. Instead of running the game on an 8x8 LED matrix, I wanted to run the game at 640x480@60Hz out the VGA port. One of my TAs for the class told me that one of the other professors had a VGA module we could use to make it easier, but I knew I wanted to implement my own, even if just to use it as an additional learning opportunity. My interest in video also had me intrigued about implementing my own video output.

Now, with my project decided, we can move onto the fun part, how I actually implemented this beast.