Copyright (c) 2016 Nicholas DeCicco. See LICENSE.md for licensing details.
This project contains code and design files for a MSP430 Pong game, playable by two people on an NTSC television.
Disclaimer: Video signals are generated using one big loop without using a timer to ensure that scan line lengths stay constant. Further, for lack of time, I have not ensured that alternate paths through the code are timed exactly equally. As a result, there is no small amount of tearing visible. Some televisions handle this better than others.
I have also noticed that while the video looks fine on some models of televisions, there is a considerable amount of tearing visible with, for example, the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 PCI capture card. It would appear that the Hauppauge card does not like how I am differentiating even and odd frames.
A schematic is available in pcb/schematic.pdf. This project requires the MSP-EXP430G2 Launchpad development board. I built the circuit on perfboard as a module with male headers that would plug directly into the Launchpad, though it should be trivial to place the MSP430G2231 on the same board.
This code has only been tested with TI's version of GCC and Peter A. Bigot's MSP430 GCC toolchain (now obsoleted by TI's toolchain; this is the version available in the Ubuntu package repositories).
Note that there are three subdirectories of src/: bars, bitmap, and
pong. pong contains the Pong game source code; bars contains code which
generates black and white vertical bars on the screen; and bitmap will
produce a low-resolution bitmap on the screen.
These instructions should work for other Debian-derived distributions. First, install the MSP430 GCC toolchain:
sudo apt-get install gcc-msp430 msp430-libc mspdebug
Then, cd into the source directory and run make:
make
With the target device (Launchpad) connected, run
make upload
The easiest way to obtain the GCC toolchain is to install TI's Code Composer Studio, then install the MSP430 GCC add-on; see the Code Composer documentation for more information.
The Makefile is written to use MSP430Flasher to flash the device; download and install MSP430Flasher from http://www.ti.com/tool/msp430-flasher.
You either must put C:\TI\gcc\bin\ and C:\TI\MSP430Flasher_x.y.z on your
%PATH%, or edit the Makefile(s) to point directly to the locations of the
needed binaries.
Then, cd into the source directory and run make:
make
With the target device (Launchpad) connected, run
make upload