Results of the Design

Speed

During the actual gameplay, we did not see any TV jittering, sluggishness of the moving ducks, or slowness of the program. Whenever the trigger was pulled and the gun was pointed at something white, you could see the moving ducks flash black very briefly, but this was how the duck detection functioned and was expected. The gameplay did not slow down when the trigger was pulled. Whenever the controller was used in two player mode to control the speed/direction of the duck, there was no slowdown of the program at all. The MCU had time to perform all functions without compromising the gameplay. Since sound was controlled by the second MCU, there were no issues related to sluggishness of sound.

Accuracy

There were no issues with video signal timing as the MCU had enough time to perform all tasks before the next raster update because we split up the drawing of large objects appropriately. These multi-frame drawings happened too fast for the eye to notice. The logistics of the game functioned as it should have without any known problems. The Duck Hunt gun worked very well and we did not have any problems with it not detecting white/black or not detecting a trigger pull. As for sound, the music generated by DDS of a sine wave worked very well and produced clean tones. We had issues with the gunshot and flapping noises that were sampled into flash memory that produced a high frequency pitch. We had to cascade four lowpass filters together to attenuate the noise although it was still slightly audible after filtering.

Safety

Because our project dealt with video, we had to be aware of the fact that some video could cause seizures in people. We carefully considered this in our program by getting rid of any type of visible flicker. The only visible flickering we saw was early on in our testing stages when two ducks passed through each other on the screen. We noticed that this caused the ducks to flicker every time they crossed paths. We got rid of this problem by making the ducks bounce of each other instead of going through each other. We did not see any other types of flickering. The wings of the ducks do flap periodically, but we do not think that will cause any problems. Since our project did not deal with any high voltages, we did not have to worry about isolation or burning out any components.

Interference

Our project did not generate any harmful RF noise. We did have to test the sounds through a speaker, but the volume was turned down so we didn't distract other people in lab. The spectacle of the duck hunt game did attract attention in lab, though we tried to keep as low a profile as possible.

Usability

Our game was very easy to learn because we had played it before as children. Our implementation has visual instructions and isn't particularly hard to figure out because it mimics the NES game. The gun was a crucial part of our game that was straightforward to use once we investigated the signals and it worked without any major problems. The video drawn on the screen was very detailed and it was easy to figure out what was trying to be represented. The sounds complimented the video on the screen adding to the realism of what we wanted to represent. Overall, we thought our game was easy to learn and fun to play.