HI-TECH Software Forums: HI-TECHtris

Ok, to kick off this new forum I will talk about a fun project we did recently.

Every year we (HI-TECH Software) attend the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco. Each year we like to demonstrate whatever our latest products are. This year the dsPICC compiler was new for us and so we decided to do a demo for it.

For those of you not familiar with the dsPIC processors, they are basically a 16-bit microcontroller with a few dsp instructions added. The idea being that it is a single chip solution that can do a bit of everything. (that's not a particularly good description, click here for better details).

The intended purposes for these dsPIC processors are for use in applications for motor control, signal processing, etc... Now we could have done a boring project like that - but instead we decided on seeing if we could implement the game of Tetris. If you don't know what Tetris is (where have you been!?), click here.

What made us think of doing Tetris was the layout of the dsPICDEM board from Microchip. The demo board has a long graphical LCD with four push buttons. Tetris only needs four buttons (left, right, rotate, drop block), so it was perfect for it.

We only had a couple of days before the conference to write the program, but we ended up with what we now call "HI-TECHtris". See below:

I've attached a copy of the game to this message. At the moment I've only included the HEX file. For those of you that have a demo board with a dsPIC 30F6014, you should be able to just program it with this and it'll work.

Known problems:
We didn't have time to de-bounce the push buttons - but this just tends to add to the difficulty of the game

cheers,

--------------------
Matt Luckman
Microchip Technology Inc.



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