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Introduction
Introduction
For our final project, we have decided to build a minesweeper game with a microcontroller and a PS/2 mouse to be displayed on the TV. Minesweeper is a famous game that comes with the MS-Windows operating system, and the objective of the game is to determine the location of mines on the board.
So, what exactly is
“Minesweeper”?
“Minesweeper” is originally a PC game that comes along with the Windows bundle. For our design, there are 15 x 10 cells on the game board. At first, all 150 cells are covered, and the player can left-click the PS/2 mouse on a destined cell to uncover it, or right-click to mark the cell with a flag – a reminder to the player that the cell is possibly taken by a mine.
The objective of the game is to
locate all the mines as quickly as possible without uncovering any of them. The
default number of mines in our game is 25. If you uncover any of the mines, you
lose the game. If a number appears on a square that you have uncovered, it indicates how
many mines are in the eight squares that surround it.
When you have successfully uncovered all
cells without mines, you will then have won the game, and a “You Won”
message would be shown on the TV screen. Else, if any cell with a mine is
uncovered, the game is over and a “GAME OVER” message would be shown. In
both cases, right click the mouse to restart the game.
There is also a timer in the lower right
hand corner of the screen, showing how much time you are taking to play the
game. Once you win or lose the game, the timer would stop.
Another feature is the “remaining mine
count”. When you have marked a cell with a flag, the count shown in
the lower left hand corner of the screen would decrease.
Why do we pick this project?
There are several reasons why we wanted to
implement this “Minesweeper” game with TV display and PS/2 mouse control.
First of all, the complexity of hardware in this project is of appropriate level
but the cost required is cheap. All we needed to buy is the PS/2 receptacle for
the mouse, which is just $0.99. The mouse that we use in this project is a used
mouse and it is free. Moreover, the parts that we require can be easily
replaced. Soldering would be needed to link the signaling wires to the mouse
through the receptacle, but this can be done easily.
Secondly, we are already pretty familiar
with the interfacing between the microcontroller and the TV after doing labs 3
& 4, so we can divert our attention to the mouse/microcontroller interfacing
and game programming.
Thirdly, we feel that writing this game
would be fun and yet challenging enough. Writing the game itself needs
systematic and logical thinking: we must make sure that the big parts work so
that the game can be played, but we must also pay attention to details, so that
the game can run smoothly. Besides the game programming, the mouse interfacing
would be another challenge to us, but we proceed with this idea, since the mouse
is nevertheless the best controller to be used to play a game like
“Minesweeper” and we had some good reference to back us up. A good challenge
is what that makes this project meaningful.
What
we did?
We used two Atmel MEGA 32 microcontrollers for this project: One is used to produce signals to the TV display, while the other microcontroller is used to get data from the mouse. The necessary game computation is also done in the second microcontroller and deliver to the first microcontroller through UART connection. Details are shown in the subsequent sections.