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UCC2014: The Uzebox Code Challenge is back!
February 11, 2014 at 7:35 pm

The Uzebox community is officially launching its second game coding contest!  The contest will run from March 1st to September 1st 2014 and will offer prizes in hardware and cold [...]

New Game Alert: Candle Burner!
December 23, 2013 at 10:38 am

Just in time, Harty released a fun little game called Candle Burner full with holiday music! Light up all candles on an xmas tree as fast as possible..but don’t move [...]

New Game Alert: XOR!
August 20, 2013 at 12:01 am

Retro gamers rejoice once more! Pitfall Jones  published his latest game, XOR, a port of an 8-bit game made by Astral Software back in 1987 for computers like the BBC Micro, [...]

UZE8: A Chip-8 Emulator for the Uzebox!
July 10, 2013 at 9:34 pm

Omundodogabriel released UZE8, a Chip-8 and SuperChip emulator for the Uzebox! It runs full speed and loads games from the SD card too! You can download the binaries and sources here.

UCC2013 is Over: Winners Announced!
June 17, 2013 at 8:52 am

The contest is over, we have the winners! Head over to the forums to see who grabbed the prizes! The link is here. Congratulations to all for their effort and [...]

More News...
About

The Uzebox is a retro-minimalist 8-bit open source game console. It is based on an AVR 8-bit general purpose microcontroller made by Atmel. The particularity of the system is that it uses an interrupt driven kernel and has no frame buffer. Functions such as video signal generation, tile rendering and music mixing is done in realtime by a background task so your game can easily be developed in C. The design goal was to be as simple as possible yet have good enough sound and graphics to implement interesting games. Emphasis was put on making it easy and fun to assemble and program for any hobbyists. The final design contains only two chips: an ATmega644 and an AD725 RGB-to-NTSC converter.

Current Features
  • Low parts count and cost: The system is made of only two chips and discrete components.
  • Interrupt driven kernel: No cycle counting required, sound mixing and video generation are all made in the background.
  • 256 simultaneous colors: Accomplished by using a R-2R resistor ladder DAC.
  • 4 channels sound engine: The sound subsystem is composed of 3 wavetable channels and 1 noise or PCM channel.
  • MIDI In: With a music sequencer, allows the creation of music directly on the console.
  • Retro controllers: The joypad inputs uses standard NES/SNES controllers interface.
  • SNES Mouse Support
  • SD/MicroSD card interface
  • Expandable: I/O lines and peripherals are still available, like the UART and SPI port for one to experiment.
  • Emulator: A fully, cycle-perfect, emulator was developed and greatly eases development.
  • Gameloader (beta): Load and flash games stored on SD cards!
  • API: Develop games using an API that provides multiple video modes, sound driver and more.
  • Open Source: The software and hardware design are totally free and licensed under the GPL.
Specifications

CPU: ATmega644 microcontroller
Total RAM: 4K
Program Memory: 64K
Speed: 28.61818Mhz (Overclocked)
Colors: 256 simultaneous colors arranged in a 3:3:2 color space (Red:3 bits, Green:3 bits, Blue: 2 bits)
Resolution: Up to 360x224 pixels (tiles-only and tiles-and-sprites modes)
Sprites: Up to 32 simultaneous sprites on screen at any time
Video output: NTSC Composite and S-Video (Works without changes on most PAL/SECAM TVs)
Sound: 4 channels wavetable, 8-bit mono, mixed at ~15Khz and output via PWM
Inputs: Two NES/SNES compatible joypad inputs
Options: MIDI-in interface and s-video output
Showcase

These videos demonstrates some of the features of the Uzebox. The first one is a Tetris clone named "AVR Megatris". The game is fully functional and implements most of the official "Super Rotation System" (SRS) system complete with hold block, t-spins and ghost piece...it even plays classic Tetris songs!

Megatris Movie Uzebox AVCore Movie ESD Attack Movie Moon Patrol Movie Halloween Demo Movie Music Engine Demo Video Player Demo Uzebox Games Recap
Buy Uzebox Kit at Adafruit
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Latest Stable Version: 1.16
Features   Download   Sources
Pengo Thumb
Pengo Title
Pitfall Jones

Download...
Uze Snakes Thumbnail
Uze Snakes Title
Flavio Zavan

Download...
ESD Attack Thumb
ESD Attack Title
Clay Cowgill

Download...
Zombienator Thumb
Zombienator Title
Phog

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Pacman Thumb
Pacman Title
Paul McPhee

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Video Poker Thumb
Video Poker Title
Jim Croskell

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Happy Easter Thumb
Happy Easter Title
Hartmut Wendt

Download...
Frogger Thumbnail
Frogger Title
Paul McPhee

Download...
Lander Thumb
Lander Title
Hartmut Wendt

Download...
SpaceAge Thumb
SpaceAge Title
Pitfall Jones

Download...
XOR Thumb
XOR Title
Pitfall Jones

Download...

All Games and Demos...


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Copyright (c) Belogic
The Uzebox (including source code and hardware design) is released under the GNU GPL 3.0 Public Licence.
Pictures and content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Uzebox is a reserved trademark.