Arthur Benemann who is an Electrical Engineering student sent in his picChess game which uses a DSPIC33F128MC804 Microcontroller. The PIC based game can communicate using a speaker to talk and a monitor to show the game board and chess pieces. If Chess wasn’t enough Arthur also added Conway’s game of life and a music player to the system
“For the hardware the main challenge is to select a processor with power to handle the audio and video, and still have enough power to run the chess engine. The most powerful micro that i had at hand was a DSPIC33F128MC804 from microchip, that i bought to start playing around with the DSPIC33F family. And this seemed a good project to do this.
The clock is run at 80MHz this makes the use of the full processor power, and also can be scaled to get a 10MHz clock for the SPI module this is necessary by the video routine. This clock rate is obtained by the PLL block in the DSPIC33F.”