# Introduction Welcome to Hooded Havoc: Miniboss Mania, an exciting 2D platformer game created by our team Joshua, Loek, Bjorn, Frenk and Niels! This game was developed using the STM32 microcontroller as the game engine and the FPGA as the Picture Processing Unit (PPU). In Hooded Havoc: Miniboss Mania, you will take on the role of a brave hero who must battle through multiple levels filled with challenging obstacles and formidable minibosses. With smooth gameplay and engaging graphics, you will feel immersed in a world of adventure and excitement. Our use of the STM32 microcontroller and FPGA PPU allowed us to create a unique and innovative gaming experience. The STM32 provides efficient and reliable processing power, while the FPGA ensures that our graphics are rendered smoothly and accurately. So get ready to embark on a thrilling journey through Hooded Havoc: Miniboss Mania, and see how far you can make it! ## Objective The objective of Hooded Havoc: Miniboss Mania is to guide the hero through multiple levels, defeating minibosses and overcoming obstacles along the way. The ultimate goal is to reach the final boss and defeat them to retrieve the stolen staff. To achieve this objective, the player must use their platforming skills to jump, run, and dodge obstacles while also battling enemies and minibosses. Each level presents a unique challenge that will require the player to adapt and strategize to overcome. As the player progresses through the game, they will unlock new abilities and power-ups that will aid them in their journey. The player must use these abilities wisely to defeat the minibosses and ultimately save the world. So, the objective of Hooded Havoc: Miniboss Mania is not only to provide an exciting and engaging gaming experience but also to challenge players to use their skills and strategic thinking to overcome obstacles and emerge victorious. ## Problem statement One potential problem that could arise in the development of Hooded Havoc: Miniboss Mania is related to the PPU and communication between the STM32 and PPU. The PPU is responsible for rendering the graphics and displaying them on the screen, while the STM32 is responsible for processing the game logic and input from the player. However, if there is a problem with the communication between these two components, it could lead to synchronization issues and graphical glitches that could affect the player's experience. For example, if the PPU is unable to keep up with the processing speed of the STM32, the graphics may lag or appear distorted, causing the game to become unplayable. Similarly, if there is a delay in communication between the STM32 and PPU, it could result in a mismatch between the game logic and the displayed graphics, leading to confusion for the player. To ensure a smooth and enjoyable gaming experience, it is essential to address any potential issues with the PPU and communication between the STM32 and PPU during the development process. This may involve optimizing the code for both components, adjusting the communication protocol, or adding buffer systems to prevent lag or synchronization issues. # General system architecture The existing hardware components available for building this project consists of: - Raspberry Pi - Nucleo STM32 development board - Basys3 FPGA development board - Arduino Uno R3 The Raspberry Pi is by far the most powerful component out of these 4, but because one of the project requirements is that no general-purpose operating system is used, utilizing the Raspberry Pi will involve writing low-level drivers for its interfaces, which will likely cost a lot of effort. As to not risk project failure due to hardware constraints, the decision was made to use the STM32 microcontroller and FPGA in combination, as these two are both familiar and still relatively powerful platforms. Because audio and video consist of data streams that require constant output, the audio and graphics processing is outsourced to the FPGA. All other game logic processing such as world loading, or map and entity interactions is done on the STM32 microcontroller. Our game also supports an optional second player, as is shown in the following diagram.  In the above diagram, the "display" and "speaker" components are included to show what the complete system looks like. The scope of this project only includes the components inside the area marked "game console" and the gamepad components. # STM32 software The game engine is designed to run a 2D platformer game. The game engine has to manage all the different game states. To do this it will utilize a finite state machine (FSM). The game engine will also cover de input handling from the player, the game logic for example enemy handling or the powerup handling it will also send out data to the APU (Audio processing unit) so that the right sounds will be played. FSM is a useful tool for managing game states and transitions. The game has many different states such as: title screen, shop and gameplay state. Each state represents a particular configuration from the with different logic and variables. The state machine is designed to have the following states: 1. Initialization: The initialization state will be responsible for initializing all game-related variables and subsystems, including the FPGA-based picture processing unit. 2. Title Screen: The title screen state will display the game's title screen and wait for user input to start the game or access the options menu. 3. Options: The options state will allow the user to configure game settings, such as sound and graphics options. 4. Game Play: The game play state will be responsible for running the game logic and updating the game state. 5. Game Over: The game over state will display the game over screen and wait for user input to restart the game or return to the title screen. ## Input The playable character has 4 actions that it can perform: - horizontal movement - aiming - jump - ability / use To perform these action there will be 6 buttons for the user to use. A joystick is not needed for the movement because the movement is not complex, so button fulfill this. The layout will be as follows:  ## Input handling The hardware consist out of a microcontroller and a FPGA. The microcontroller will process the game logic. For this reason the input will be handled by the microcontroller as this will improve playability (stated in research). The controller will have six buttons, so six data pins are needed on the microcontroller plus a ground and 3.3V or 5V pin. In total there are eight pins needed. If the game is going to be played by 2 persons, there are six more data pins needed so 8 data pins for both controllers. For data transfer between STM32 and FPGA there are 4 pins needed at maximum (SPI for instance). The STM32 will be used and most STM32 boards have enough I/O pins for our needs. The STM32 F030 and F091 provided by Avans both have 15 digital pins and 6 analog pins. The buttons will be connected as follows:  To implement the input in the game, the input should be checked at the start of each game cycle. In this case there are no interrupts needed. ## PPU communication The SPI module will be configured that sends 8 bits per cycle and at a speed of 1.0 MB/s. The STM32 Cube IDE SPI module does not include a slave select line so a pin has to configured manually to fullfill this purpose. Every data transfer consists out of 4 times 8 bits, so 32 bits in total. The first byte is the address and the other 3 bytes consist the data. ## SPI The FPGA uses 3 JMOD pins to receive the SPI data. The FPGA does not have a IP-Core for SPI. To receive the data the module has 3 synchronisers for the incoming SPI clock, data and slave select. The data will be read via the SPI protocol and shifted untill all 32 bits are read. # PPU As mentioned in the [research document](research.md#graphics), the PPU designed for this project is heavily inspired by the NES's PPU. Because our game does need slightly different graphical capabilities, the differences between the NES PPU and our custom PPU are highlighted here. Readers of this section are expected to know basic operation of the NES's PPU. PPU features: - 320x240 @ 60Hz VGA output (upscaled to 640x480) - single tilemap with room for 1024 tiles of 16x16 pixels - 8 colors per palette, with 4096 possible colors (12-bit color depth) - 640x480 background canvas with scrolling - NO background scrolling splits - 128 total sprites on screen (NO scanline sprite limit) - sprites are always drawn on top of the background layer - PPU control using DMA (dual-port asynchronous RAM) - tiles can be flipped using FAM or BAM - vertical and horizontal blank output Notable differences: - NES nametable equivalent is called BAM (background attribute register) - NES OAM equivalent is called FAM (foreground attribute register) - 320x240 @ 60Hz output Since the FPGA board we're using has a VGA port, the PPU outputs VGA. VGA does not support custom resolutions. This resolution was chosen because it's exactly half of the lowest standard VGA resolution 640x480. This allows the PPU to use nearest-neighbor upscaling, which will lead to a simpler hardware implementation. - No scanline sprite limit This was a hardware limitation of the original NES, which our PPU design does not have. - Sprites are 16x16 Most NES games already tile multiple 8x8 tiles together into "metatiles" to create the illusion of larger sprites. This however is wasteful of the available foreground sprites, so this PPU has 16x16 pixel sprites by default. - Single 1024 sprite tilemap shared between foreground and background sprites The NES OAM registers contain a bit to select which tilemap to use (of two), which effectively expands each tile's index address by one byte. Instead of creating the illusion of two separate memory areas for tiles, having one large tilemap is a simpler solution. - 8 total palettes, with 8 colors each More colors allows for nicer looking graphics. Increasing the palette color count is a very memory intensive operation as this inflates the entire tilemap, while increasing the total palette count increases FPGA utilization. Keeping in mind that these palettes can be modified at any point during runtime, an 8x8 palette table is likely big enough. - Sprites can be positioned partially off-screen on all screen edges using only the offset bits in the FAM register The NES has a separate PPUMASK register to control special color effects, and to shift sprites off the left and top screen edges, as the sprite offsets count from 0. Our PPU's FAM sprite offset bits count from -16, so the sprite can shift past the top and left screen edges, as well as the standard bottom and right edges. - No status line register, only V-blank and H-blank outputs are supplied back to CPU The NES status line register contains a buggy status line for reaching the max sprite count per scanline, and a status line for detecting collisions between background and foreground sprites. Our PPU doesn't have a scanline limit, and all hitbox detection is done in software. Software hacks involving swapping tiles during a screen draw cycle can still be achieved by counting the V-blank and H-blank pulses using interrupts. - No background scrolling splits This feature allows only part of the background canvas to be scrolled, while another portion stays still. This was used to draw HUD elements on the background layer for displaying things like health bars or score counters. Since this PPU has a higher foreground sprite limit, the game uses regular foreground sprites to display HUD elements. - Sprites are always drawn on top of the background layer The NES PPU has the capability to draw 'foreground' sprites both behind and in front of the background layer. Our game doesn't need this capability for any visual effects. Leaving this feature out will lead to a simpler hardware design. - Sprites are positioned relative to the viewport, not the background layer This leads to a simpler hardware architecture for the foreground sprite rendering component. Since the CPU is already likely to reposition all foreground sprites on every frame, the position calculation is moved to hardware to software. ## Hardware design schematics ### Top (level 1)  Important notes: - The STM32 uses direct memory access to control the PPU. - The PPU's native resolution is 320x240. It works in this resolution as if it is a valid VGA signal. The STM32 is also only aware of this resolution. This resolution is referred to as "tiny" resolution. Because VGA-compatible LCD's likely don't support this resolution due to low clock speed, a built-in pixel-perfect 2X upscaler is internally connected before the output. This means that the display sees the resolution as 640x480, but the PPU and STM32 only work in 320x240. - The STM32 receives the TVBLANK and THBLANK lines from the PPU. These are the VBLANK and HBLANK lines from the "tiny" VGA resolution. These lines can be used to trigger interrupts for counting frames, and to make sure no simultanious reads and writes occur in the PPU. - NVSYNC, NHSYNC and the RGB signals refer to the output of the native VGA signal generator. ### Level 2  Important notes: - The pixel fetch logic is pipelined in 5 stages: 1. - (Foreground sprite info) calculate if foreground sprite exists at current pixel using FAM register - (Background sprite info) get background sprite info from BAM register 2. - (Sprite render) calculate pixel to read from TMM based on sprite info 3. - (Compositor) get pixel with 'highest' priority (pick first foreground sprite with non-transparent color at current pixel in order, fallback to background) - (Palette lookup) lookup palette color using palette register - (Display controller) output upscaled tiny display signal - The pipeline stages with two clock cycles contain an address set and memory read step. - The pipeline takes 5 clock ticks in total. About 16 are available during each pixel. Since each scanline is buffered in the upscaler, all available clock cycles can be used (if necessary). - Since the "sprite info" and "sprite render" steps are fundamentally different for the foreground and background layer, these components will be combined into one for each layer respectively. They are separated in the above diagram for pipeline stage illustration. - The AUX, FAM, and PAL registers are implemented in the component that directly accesses them, but are exposed to the PPU RAM bus for writing. - Each foreground sprite render component holds its own sprite data copy from the RAM in it's own cache memory. The cache updates are fetched during the VBLANK time between each frame. ## Registers - The PPU's memory bus has 16-bit addresses and 16-bit words. - Some memory regions use physical word sizes smaller than 16-bits, so "unneeded" bits will be discarded by the PPU. - Apparent size means the amount of addresses in a given memory region. As mentioned earlier, the exact word sizes of a memory area can vary, though this is not visible to the CPU as all data is presented as 16-bit words. |Address offset|Apparent size|Alias|Description| |-|-|-|-| |`0x0000`|`0xd000`|TMM |[tilemap memory][TMM]| |`0xd000`|`0x04b0`|BAM |[background attribute memory][BAM]| |`0xd800`|`0x0100`|FAM |[foreground attribute memory][FAM]| |`0xdc00`|`0x0040`|PAL |[palettes][PAL]| |`0xde00`|`0x0002`|AUX |[auxiliary memory][AUX]| This table contains the "official" PPU register offsets and sizes. Due to the way the address decoder works, some of these memory regions might be duplicated in the address ranges between the memory regions. This is considered undefined behavior, so the CPU should not attempt to write in these locations because there is no address validity checking. [TMM]: #tilemap-memory ### Tilemap memory - Each sprite takes up 768 bits spread across 52 15-bit words (with one discarded padding bit per word) - Pixel index order is from top-left to bottom-right in (English) reading order. - Bits `14 downto 3` of the byte with the highest address for a given tile are not used - To calculate TMM address $a$ for any given pixel $p$ of tile with index $t$, compute $a=52*t+\left\lfloor\frac{p}{5}\right\rfloor$ Word format: |Range (VHDL)|Description| |-|-| |`15`|(discarded)| |`14 downto 12`|pixel $n+4$| |`11 downto 9`|pixel $n+3$| |`8 downto 6`|pixel $n+2$| |`5 downto 3`|pixel $n+1$| |`2 downto 0`|pixel $n+0$| [BAM]: #background-attribute-memory ### Background attribute memory - 15-bit words (MSB discarded in hardware) - Address indicates which background sprite is currently targeted in reading order e.g. $\textrm{addr} = c000_{\textrm{hex}} + x + y*w$ where $x$ and $y$ are the background tile, and $w$ is the amount of horizontal tiles fit on the background layer (40) Word format: |Range (VHDL)|Description| |-|-| |`15`|(discarded)| |`14`|Flip horizontally| |`13`|Flip vertically| |`12 downto 10`|Palette index for tile| |`9 downto 0`|Tilemap index| [FAM]: #foreground-attribute-memory ### Foreground attribute memory - 32-bit words - Sprites with lower addresses are drawn "before" sprites with higher addresses Word format: |Range (VHDL)|Description| |-|-| |`31`|Flip horizontally| |`30`|Flip vertically| |`29 downto 21`|horizontal position (offset by -16)| |`20 downto 13`|vertical position (offset by -16)| |`12 downto 10`|Palette index for tile| |`9 downto 0`|Tilemap index| [PAL]: #palettes ### Palettes - 12-bit words (4 MSB discarded in hardware) - Address formula for palette color is $p_i*8 + p_c$ where $p_i$ is the palette index and $p_c$ is the color index within a given palette. Word format: |Range (VHDL)|Description| |-|-| |`15 downto 12`|(discarded)| |`11 downto 8`|Red value| |`7 downto 4`|Green value| |`3 downto 0`|Blue value| [AUX]: #auxiliary-memory ### Auxiliary memory - no words Format: |Range (VHDL)|Description| |-|-| |`31 downto 18`|(unused)| |`17`|Fetch foreground sprites flag| |`16 downto 8`|Horizontal background scroll (offset from left edge)| |`7 downto 0`|Vertical background scroll (offset from top edge)| [custompputimings]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MU6K4c4PtMR_JXIpc3I0ZJdLZNnoFO7G2P3olCz6LSc ## PPU communication To comunicate with the FPGA via the STM32 a protocol is needed. After [research](research.md#Input) of different possible protocols, SPI was the best option for this problem. As there is only one master and one slave, four data lines are needed at maximum. The STM32 will be the master and the FPGA will be the slave. The STM32 has a configurable SPI module that is easily configurable unlike the FPGA. Futhermore, the MISO line is not needed because the FPGA does not send any big data to the STM32. The slave select line will operate as a write enable. ## SPI The FPGA will configure as a slave of the SPI protocol. The FPGA (Basys3) does not have a IP-Core that supports external SPI communication so the SPI slave has to be designed. The module requires three inputs as mentioned before in the [STM32](architecture.md#STM32) section. # APU The Audio Processing Unit (APU) is programmed on the FPGA, here it will produce different signals on the audio output. These signals come in a few forms, as listed below. - triangle waves - square waves - sine waves - sawtooth waves - random noise These signals will be generated using PWM, this allows a digital signal to act as an analog signal. Using this method it is theoretically possible to create all of the aforementioned signals.  This figure shows an example signal (in blue), created by the FPGA. and the corresponding analog signal (in red). In order to generate a audio signal from a note, we need a few things: - frequency - duration - amplitude optional: - envelope (ADSR) This image shows an advanced method of generating tones. In our case this is only an indication as to how it could be done, we will actually only be looking at the sustained tone part for simplicity sakes. In order to get the correct graph forms, some data points can be stored in a LUT (Look Up Table). This allows the saving of computation power at the cost of some ROM space. This only creates one type of sound at a set frequency and amplitude. The frequency of this tone can be altered by increasing the step size of the LUT. This allows the creation of higher frequency signals at a slight loss of precision. The following pseudo code is there to show an example of this: ```c for (i = 0; i < toneLength; i++){ for (k = 0; k < sizeof(LUT); k += stepSize){ OUT = LUT[k]; } } ``` This output can then be converted to a PWM signal using known methods or existing solutions as described in the beginning of this chapter. # Level design To create sprites the program to be used is aseprite, aseprite exports their sprite palette and puts them in our 2d map editor. For creating 2d levels were using Tiled as our 2d map editor. With this software, we can create and export our maps with our preferred technique. Indexed tilemaps are the technique we’re using to export our levels from the microcontroller to the FPGA.  To index tiles from the tilemap, 10 bits will be used for both the foreground and background layers of the PPU. This means that the global tilemap can fit up to 1024 tiles in total, each being 16x16 pixels (the example uses 4x4 tiles for illustration purposes).