Another World (Out of This World in the U.S.) is a true classic, a title not only loved for its outstanding design, art and gameplay but studied in exhaustive detail because of its excellent implementation and author Eric Chahi's commentaries. Now the game's been implemented as a field-programmable gate array, which is to say the virtual machine that Chachi devised to make it system-portable in an era of wildly diverse hardware is hardcoded into a chip of its own. Sylvain Lefebvre:
This project is my personal homage to Another World. This game is not only a graphical and gameplay masterpiece, it is also a technical marvel: The entire game runs on a beautifully designed Virtual Machine (VM) that calls only a blitter and rasterizer to produce the graphics in four framebuffers! (what's a vm, blitter or rasterizer anyway?)
The VM is quite minimalistic, and both the blitter and rasterizer are good candidates for hardware designs. Therefore it was very tempting to create a hardware implementation of the entire framework : no standard CPU, a truly native hardware version of the Another World VM, blitter and rasterizer. While I'll keep referring to the "VM" in the following, keep it mind it will become an actual custom processor, implementing on an FPGA all of Another World opcodes in hardware. This is not a 6502, not a Z80, not a 68000: this is an Out-Of-This-World-chip!
Reading this I learned that Chahi first devised his game-running virtual machine for the Amstrad CPC, an 8-bit system with only 64kb of RAM. The sheer economy and efficiency of it is mindblowing.
