Snake in Hardware | Simten

Snake in Hardware<br>This whole thing runs without a CPU. Every move the snake makes is decided by wires and gates, all at once, on each clock tick. It’s about 100 nodes of logic, registers, and memory, all written in TypeScript and simulated live in your browser. The same code exports to Verilog. Here’s how it works.<br>Interactive tutorial/~12 min read

Pixels & Memory<br>The screen is just memory. One byte per pixel across an 8×8 grid, and setting a byte to 1 lights that pixel up. The catch: the game has to write pixels while the display reads them, at the same time. A DualPortRAM gives us exactly that, two independent windows into one block of memory. Port A is where game logic reads and writes; port B feeds the Screen , which scans the addresses to draw the grid.<br>Addresses run left to right, top to bottom: 0 is top-left, 7 is top-right, 63 is bottom-right. The pattern below draws a border.<br>Toggle write-enable , set an address and data, then Tick to write a pixel; the HexDisplay shows what reads back. Snake runs this same cycle every frame.

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Simple Framebuffer<br>DualPortRAM + Screen: toggle write-enable, set address and data, then tick to write a pixel

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From Coordinates to Pixels<br>The snake moves on a 2D grid, but the framebuffer is a flat array of 64 bytes. We convert (X, Y) to a linear address: address = (Y « 3) + X.<br>Multiplying by 8 is a left shift by 3, and in hardware a constant shift costs zero gates . It’s just wiring. Each bit of Y connects three places higher, the low three bits tied to zero. The only real gate is the final Adder for X.<br>Change X and Y below. At (3, 2) you get address 19, row 2 column 3.

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Coordinate to Pixel Address<br>(Y

Decoding Player Input<br>Arrow keys produce scan codes: Up 72, Down 80, Left 75, Right 77. The circuit turns these into movement deltas deltaX and deltaY , each −1, 0, or +1.<br>Four Comparators check the code against each direction. Their outputs feed a Mux tree that picks the delta: Left sets deltaX to 255 (−1 in unsigned 8-bit), Right sets it to 1, otherwise 0. deltaY works the same for Up and Down.<br>Set the key code below to 72, 75, 77, or 80 and watch the two delta displays flip between −1, 0, and +1.

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Direction Decoder<br>Key code to deltaX/deltaY. Try 72 (Up), 75 (Left), 77 (Right), 80 (Down)

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Moving a Pixel<br>Now make a pixel move. Two Registers hold the head position, headX and headY, both starting at 4. Each tick adds the deltas to get the next position.<br>The grid wraps: walk off the right edge and you reappear on the left. That comes for free by keeping only the lowest 3 bits of each coordinate, which forces it back into the 0–7 range. Column 7 + 1 wraps to 0; column 0 − 1 wraps to 7 (0 − 1 = 255, and 255 & 0b111 = 7). The part doing it is a BitSlice , and there’s no edge-case check anywhere; the wrap falls out of the arithmetic.<br>The wrapped coordinates become a pixel address (Y×8+X) written to the framebuffer. Flip enable on, set a direction code, and tick to walk the pixel across the screen.

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Pixel Mover<br>Toggle enable, set a direction (72/75/77/80), and tick to move the pixel

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Multi-Step Operations<br>A RAM port does one thing per cycle: read or write, at one address. But moving the snake needs four memory operations: read the tail’s address, clear that pixel, write the new head to the body buffer, draw the new head pixel. So we run four phases .<br>A 2-bit register counts the phase, ticking 0 → 1 → 2 → 3 and back to 0. It only holds two bits, so it wraps after 3 on its own (a BitSlice keeping the low two bits). Comparators watch the count and switch on the right RAM operation for each phase.<br>Toggle enable and tick to watch the counter cycle; each LED marks its phase. In the full game, the four ticks make one complete “game step.”

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4-Phase Counter<br>Toggle enable and tick to see the phase cycle through 0-1-2-3

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Eating Food<br>When the head lands on the food, the snake grows by one segment and the food respawns. To catch that, compare head X to food X and head Y to food Y. If both match, it’s a hit.<br>Two Comparators produce equality flags; an And gate combines them into a collision signal that drives a “grow” flag, 1 on a hit and 0 otherwise.<br>In the full game, grow suppresses the tail for one step: the head advances, the tail stays, so the snake gets one longer. Match the coordinates below (or don’t) and watch the collision LED.

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Collision Detector<br>Change head/food coordinates to match and see the collision LED light up

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The Full Snake Game<br>Everything from the sections above is one circuit now: framebuffer, addressing, the phase pipeline, collision detection, the lot. The full Snake circuit is about 300 lines of TypeScript, compiled and running in your browser.<br>The body is a circular buffer of pixel addresses in RAM 64–127. The four phases: phase 0 reads the tail address, phase 1 clears the tail pixel, phase 2 writes the new head address,...