Defender (1981 video game) - VHDL FPGA implementation for Digital Systems Design

Original game:

Defender is a scrolling shooter video game developed by Williams Electronics in 1980 and released for arcades in 1981. Defender was one of the most important titles of the golden age of arcade video games, selling over 55,000 units to become the company’s best-selling game and one of the highest-grossing arcade games ever. Praise among critics focused on the game’s audio-visuals and gameplay.

This is a recreation of the famous video game from the “golden era” of gaming. It was written in VHDL using Quartus for the DE-10 Lite Development board.

The DE-10 Lite board from Intel includes a VGA connector and this was used for video output for the gameplay. This is a recreation of the original game completed as the final project for digital system design, a course at my university.

RTL View

RTL Instantiation