Title :
MEMOCODE 2014 software design contest: Space Invaders emulator
Author :
Edwards, Stephen A. ; Patel, Harshida
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Columbia Univ., New York, NY, USA
Abstract :
The MEMOCODE design contest for 2014 was centered around the emulation of the 1978 Taito video game Space Invaders. The challenge is to improve the speed of a cycle-accurate software emulator for the game. Contestants had a month toope improve the provided code, which already ran fairly well on the ARM-based Raspberry Pi platform. Entries were judged on how much faster their code ran and its quality. The winning groups used a variety of optimization techniques ranging from dynamic binary translation, data-structure restructuring, and improving instruction and data caching.
Keywords :
cache storage; computer games; data structures; microcontrollers; software quality; ARM-based Raspberry Pi platform; MEMOCODE software design contest; Space Invaders emulator; Taito video game; cycle-accurate software emulator; data caching improvement; data-structure restructuring; dynamic binary translation; instruction improvement; optimization techniques; software quality; winning groups; Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Games; Hardware; Optimization; Registers; Software; Hardware emulation; Hardware/software codesign; Instruction set simulator; Raspberry Pi;
Conference_Titel :
Formal Methods and Models for Codesign (MEMOCODE), 2014 Twelfth ACM/IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Lausanne
DOI :
10.1109/MEMCOD.2014.6961857
