Conclusions
Expectations and Future Improvements
Even though the results did not perfectly match our initial expectations, as explained in the Software Design and Hardware Design pages, we were very satisfied after we finished the project. The size of the entire system is small enough for us to carry it around, which was one of our main goals: making our own portable game console. In addition, we were proud of ourselves that we designed and coded the games from scratch, instead of running existing games with an emulator. Overall, we were happy that we not only designed and built our own hardware, but also successfully implemented three video games with very few bugs, although there is definitely room for future improvements. Some possible improvements that we are currently considering include adding sound effects/background music, having another joystick (or other sensors that can control movement) so we can enjoy the games with our friends, and creating new games for more variety. We also would like to try using a larger LCD screen, as it is a bit hard to read the texts on our screen right now.
Conformity of the Design to the Applicable Standards
Before we started the software desgin, we referenced the original Pong and Snake, as well as other famous versions of the games. After understanding the logic of these games, we discussed how we want to redesign them while ensuring that they still look like “Pong” and “Snake”. For example, when we looked at other implementations of Snake, some versions allowed the snake to loop back to the other side when it goes beyond the screen edges, but the version that we are familiar with did not have such a feature, so we chose to implement it in our way, as that was the entire purpose of this project—bringing back our childhood memories. Similarly, our Pong game is a one-player version, whereas the original Pong was for two players. The Memory game was our own implementation, and as far as we know, we have not heard of a similar game. The fact that we designed the hardware from scratch rather than purchasing an existing game console frame also distinguish our work from other game projects.
Intellectual Property Considerations:
Although Pong and Snake are not our original games, we did not take code from the original versions or other people. We looked at other people’s gitHub repositories or personal webpages to help understand the general logic and syntax, but we did not copy their code. We do not think that our project violates any copyrights/patents, as this project was not for profit. We did not reverse-engineer in our project, as we designed both hardware and software from scratch. We also did not have to sign any non-disclosure to get a sample part for our project. Since both the software and hardware designs are unique, we could potentially have a patent opportunity, but we are not entirely certain if we can still have Pong and Snake as our games, as they are not our original creations.