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

fYear

2014

fDate

19-21 Oct. 2014

Firstpage

185

Lastpage

185

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;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Formal Methods and Models for Codesign (MEMOCODE), 2014 Twelfth ACM/IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Lausanne

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MEMCOD.2014.6961857

Filename

6961857