Capstone project (Arcade Game System)

All CS students at the University of Missouri – Columbia are required to do a capstone project in their senior year.  My group decided to make a game console for an arcade cabinet and a game to demonstrate it.

The capstone project is broken into two semesters, with the first semester spent on the design process and various state educational requirements they couldn’t fit into any other class like IP law and ethics.  The class doesn’t meet during the second semester, with the time instead allocated to group meetings.

Our team (EONGames / Arkanerdz) consisted of:

  • Adam Crume
  • Dustin Culbertson
  • Michael Noland
  • Remy Nsengiyumva
  • Tim Vette

The console was based around a BlueStreak ARM SOC running at 77 MHz, with a 512×384 framebuffer (visible display region is smaller), and plugged into any standard arcade cabinet with a JAMMA connector.

The game we made for our system was ‘Super Magical Happy Fun Kill Time II’, which is a Leprechaun themed 2D shmup written in C.

I have placed the project presentation from semester 1 online, but the prototype hardware ate itself after the semester 2 final presentation when someone plugged the JAMMA connector in backwards.  The polarity key in the JAMMA connector of my old cabinet fell out at some point, and no-one noticed, but thankfully it happened after we had presented for the class!  When I get around to it, I was thinking about making an emulator for it to show off the game, or just buying a new SOC board.