This isn’t an FPGA emulating Mario Bros., it’s an FPGA playing the game by analyzing the video as well as sending controller commands. It’s a final project for an engineering course. The ECE5760 advanced FPGA course over at Cornell university that always offers home entertainment for us each time the final projects are due.
Developed by team members [Jeremy Blum], [Jason Wright], as well as [Sima Mitra], the video parsing is a hack. To get things working they converted the NES’s 240p video signal to VGA. This resulted in a rolling frame show in the demo video. It likewise messes with the element ratio as well as causes a few other headaches however the FPGA still manages to interpret the image correctly.
Look carefully at the screen capture above as well as you’ll see some stuff that shouldn’t be there. The team developed a set of tests used to identify obstacles in Mario’s way. The red lines represent blocks he will have to jump over. This likewise works for pits that he needs to avoid, with a different set of tests to discover moving enemies. once it knows what to do the FPGA emulates the controller signals necessary, pushing them to the vintage gaming console to see him safely to the end of the first level.
We think this is much more hard-core than some other autonomous Mario playing hacks just since it patches into the original console hardware instead of using an emulator.