FPGA based tabletop Pengo console

As a kid in the 1980ies, one of my favoured arcade games was Pengo, a maze action / puzzle game. I spent most of my pocket money playing it, and when I was introduced to dialup bulletin board systems in the same era, I chose Pengo as my online nick name, which stuck for some 10 years.

The adaptions of the game for home computers never sparked any fire in me, though, mostly because of the inferior graphics. The arcade version only had a display resolution of 224 by 288 pixels, but sprites and colors made it much prettier than what Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC 464 or Commodore 64 could do.

At one point, a friend gave me an original Pengo arcade game logic board, which I have been carrying around for years, always wanting to make it playable at some point. Due to the non-standard video output generated by the board, I've never actually done it. Recently, I wanted to do something electronics related in my free time, and I picked the Pengo project up.

Arcade game emulation

Emulation is a common way nowadays to run ancient software. The older the software is, the harder it usually gets to find original hardware to run it on. Emulators provide a way to run original ancient software on current hardware, using software to impersonate the original hardware that the program expects to run on. Emulators exist for all kinds of systems and they are also useful when developing for embedded or other non-desktop environments.

Arcade game emulation is rather popular, with the open source MAME emulator being ubiquitous. MAME emulates all sorts of game hardware, starting in the 1970ies up to rather recently. Versions for most popular desktop operating systems are available, and there is MAME4ALL for the Raspberry Pi, too. MAME emulates the hardware for a huge number of games, but it is not distributed together with the ROM images for any of these games, for licensing reasons. ROM images are distributed through the familiar channels, though.

Another way to run older software is to use an FPGA to actually implement the original hardware. In the FPGA, almost arbitrary digital hardware can be created using configuration, so to run arcade software, one needs to recreate the original hardware in a hardware description language. Several arcade hardware systems have been implemented using FPGAs, and Pengo is one of them.

Compared to the software emulation approach that MAME uses, hardware emulation is less flexible as only one typically only one game fits into the configuration memory of one of the cheap FPGA boards. Also, fewer hardware emulations are available. FPGA based emulation boots quicker and requires less power, though.

FPGA based Pengo build

As I wanted to play with FPGAs again, I opted to use a Paplio Pro FPGA board for which a port of Pengo exists. The port includes a video scan doubler so that a standard VGA output signal is generated. All I/O is done through an Arcade MegaWing, which conveniently makes all I/O needed for emulating Arcade hardware accessible on standard connectors.

Wanting to finish up the project once and for all, I decided to get a cheap, used Dell 1504FP 15'' TFT monitor, a Zippyy Arcade and Fight Stick, a bunch of arcade buttons from eBay and talked my brother, who is a carpenter, into helping me build a proper desktop cabinet in his workshop.

To complete the hardware, I found myself a nice industrial 5V switched mode power supply to power the FPGA board and a small Kemo M031N audio amplifier module connected to a speaker.

The port of Pengo to the FPGA required some tweaking in the top level VHDL module to adapt it to the wiring that I used inside of the cabinet - The first joystick port is used for the coin and start signals, the second port is connected to the joystick. I also tweaked the DIP switch settings to suit my taste, which is something that must be done in VHDL as the Arcade MegaWing does not have switches that one could use for run-time reconfiguration.

More games!

At this point, my tabletop console only works for Pengo, and sure enough there are other games that one would want to play on it. Using a more flexible MAME based engine would get me there, and I experimentally swapped the FPGA board for a Raspberry Pi with MAME4ALL. While Pengo works fine on the Pi, the video display quality is much lower because MAME4ALL unconditionally uses antialiasing. This makes the resulting image blurry, no matter what physical resolution is chosen for the Pi. The FPGA based emulation uses simple scan doubling for video scaling which results in super-crisp display quality even though the TFT's physical resolution is not matched by the FPGA video output. So for now, I'm going to stick with the one game solution until MAME4ALL is fixed or I can find another way to run MAME.