Digital Design Lab Final Project

For our final project for the digital design lab course at UCLA, we (myself and my partner, Edward Chu) created a game similar to Guitar Hero. The game can only play one song, “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. Our original plan for the game was more complex than we were able to implement due to limited time available in the lab, but it is still fully playable. The source and our more formal report are available on GitHub.

Here’s a demo:

I had never used Verilog before the start of this course, and after the first lab session I was not expecting to do well in the course. I had taken CS M51a, the introduction to digital logic design course at UCLA, but the whole system of writing Verilog and deploying to an FPGA with the Xilinx ISE seemed alien, especially with the emphasis that it was not the same as writing software. However, as we went through the process of learning about Verilog and completed assignments of increasing complexity, I really started enjoying it.

I learned a lot in this lab, and I had a lot of fun messing around with the FPGA trying to create this final project. In the end, I am very happy with what we accomplished, and although I doubt that I will be using these skills in the future, I enjoyed learning them.