One thing that makes FPGAs so great is flexibility and the unlimited type of projects that can be made using an FPGA, however, it’s still limited by the amount of resources it has especially when you want to run a big project that requires a large amount of memory space.

Papilio user hamster a.k.a Mike Field noted that the serial Flash chip that stores the FPGA settings has a lot of unused space, this flash is almost always larger than the FPGA needs the Papilio One 250k for exemple has 4 megabits of flash memory but only 1.5 megabits are used! So he decided to try to use that free space to store user data.

He got this idea from Alex’s project of implementing Bomb Jack game in the Papilio One in that project Alex used the 512Kb SRAM chip to store all the sprites, sounds, and levels of the game and hamster wanted to generalize the hack to work with other projects and other FPGA development boards.

Fortunately for all papilio users hamster wrote an excellent tutorial complete with full source code and everything needed to make that very interesting project work on your Papilio board 🙂 Thank you Mike for all the great work you’ve done for the Papilio community so far.

Click here for the original project page, enjoy!

Feel free to discuss in the comments thread.