Quick Guide: 4 Easy Steps To Play Snake on Your FPGA

Hello FPGA lovers. I am sure you are going to love today´s post: How to implement Snake Game on your FPGA. Maybe some of you are too young to remember this everlasting game that has been popular generation after generation on a wide variety of formats. And as it couldn´t be less, Snake Game deserves to be played on a FPGA.

The tutorial I am presenting today was developed by a group of students from the University of Manitoba.  The project has 4 simple steps and all the hardware that you will need is your FPGA, a VGA monitor, a PS/2 keyboard, a USB cable and a power cable. Easy stuff here. Sorry for those hand-work lovers. More on that in future posts.

Well, getting back to the snake. According to the authors the more difficult parts to develop where the VGA output and the PS/2 keyboard input, as there is not too much information available on internet for its coding using Verilog. Read this, if you want to learn useful basics that will help you in future projects.

The FPGA that they used was an Altera DE2 Cyclone IV. Thus you may need to adapt the Verilog program to your FPGA. You can download the whole code here.

Another aspect I would like to highlight for you, it is their approach for coding the snake itself and what it eats, apples (funny uh). No they are not from IBM. Anyway, you may like to make your snake carnivore or a sweet lover so read these steps up and play with the code. Make your snake a dragon that eats carrots or whatever you want. This is the magic of coding.

We would love to see your modifications!

But as always, have fun!

By D. Lovegrove, I. Sweetland, K. Jacobson & R. Alves