Gameduino: an Arduino game adapter (opens in new tab)

This does't really seem to take advantage of arduino's niche. Why not just write games for the PC?

The Uzebox AVCore (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9024) is arguably a more impressive technical achievement: sound and color video generated in software from an overclocked AVR, no FPGA magic, and less than $20 in parts.

Linux Akesson's Craft demo (http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/index.php) also generates VGA graphics and sound, using only an AVR.

Wow, this is really nicely done. This system is a love letter to the best game consoles of the 80's.

It looks like it would be great for building small-scale interactive museum exhibits. You want something durable, easy to program, hard to mess with and self-contained that can output video simply and is able to connect to highly custom inputs.

I'm a little concerned it might be hard to replace, though, considering the Gameduino is a custom chip.

Museum exhibits often have very long lives. The legendary Charles and Ray Eames exhibit for IBM, Mathematica, is now 50 years old but still on display at the Boston Museum of Science. Okay, not really relevant, but I totally love that exhibit:

http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/mathematica.html

Many more details here: http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/

    * video output is 400x300 pixels in 512 colors

        * all color processed internally at 15-bit precision
        * compatible with any standard VGA monitor (800x600 @ 72Hz)
        * background graphics
              o 512x512 pixel character background
              o 256 characters, each with independent 4 color palette
              o pixel-smooth X-Y wraparound scroll
        * foreground graphics
              o each sprite is 16x16 pixels with per-pixel transparency
              o each sprite can use 256, 16 or 4 colors
              o four-way rotate and flip
              o 96 sprites per scan-line, 1536 texels per line
              o pixel-perfect sprite collision detection

    * audio output is a stereo 12-bit frequency synthesizer

        * 16 independent voices 10-4000 Hz
        * per-voice sine wave or white noise

Very cool, although not sure if it's unique ... Maybe by being an Arduino add-on, but there have been other DIY 8-bit consoles (here's one: http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?pro...).

This was impressively polished, it really shows that the author has been around a bit. :) I found the lack of any more concrete specifications a bit annoying, but maybe I just failed at locating information about e.g. what chip powers the board.