Designing a Tetris Circuit

Nearly everybody knows what Tetris is.  Invented a number of years ago by Russian inventor Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris is a falling-blocks style puzzle game that involves fitting blocks of four squares together in a way so that there are few if any gaps or spaces between the blocks.  In a two-dimensional space, a player would horizontally shift and rotate a block to move it into an appropriate position before dropping it onto a previously existing structure of Tetris blocks.  When Tetris was first introduced to the world through the Nintendo/Gameboy game systems, it was an instant hit and bestseller. Up to today, Tetris has been reworked and remixed numerous times, yet it has always remained software, a program that runs on a particular system.  It has never yet been hardwired with discrete components - it has always remained software and not hardware, due to the simplicity of programming software compared to the engineering of hardware. Accordingly, this website is dedicated to the construction of a electronics circuit that emulates old-school tetris, constructing a completely hardware circuit that runs classic tetris the way it was meant to be.  Check back periodically for updates. Currently, three parts of the Tetris hardware have been fully constructed, with several more in the works.  Parts finished are the display logic, the computation and control logic, and the block rotation logic.  Currently in the works are the up/down and left/right shifter, a background RAM, and an interaction ROM/RAM.

Classic Tetris

Navigation

The Display

Computation and Control

Block Rotation

The Next Step

Tetrinet - a Tetris Emulator

Contact Information

Name:

Jonathan Lee

Email:

jlee@lan.tjhsst.edu