Imagesource: Apple App Store

In the same year that The Last Boy Scout flickered across the movie screens of the western world, a clever French developer came up with a game engine and a game that would shape an entire generation. (My personal Bruce Willis of gaming history.) 32 years later – in July of this year – there was a release for this game that pretty much nobody would have expected.

Another World, also known as Out of this World, might have been one of the most influential games of the 90s. The cinematic platformer, designed by Eric Chahi and released by Delphine Software International, is renowned for its unique art style, cutscenes, minimalistic controls and particularly its – for the time – phenomenal vector graphics as well as the underlying, cleverly designed virtual machine, which made porting the game quite straightforward.

Over the years, it has become a cult classic, and it's probably difficult to find a platform that it hasn't been ported to. So, what's left to do?

Sylvain Lefebvre, known online as @sylefeb, approached the game from an entirely different angle. He implemented Eric Chahi's VM directly in hardware! That's right - no standard CPU, but a truly native hardware version of the Another World VM, blitter, and rasterizer. 😱

No CPU emulation here. Nope. He has successfully adapted the entire VM directly for the FPGAs IceBreaker, MCH2022, and ULX3S.

For those who don't currently have the hardware available, you can install his even more impressive project, Silice. Silice is his very own HDL, and for those who have been at odds with Verilog and VHDL, this might finally provide a gateway into the world of FPGAs.

Here are two fantastic projects that you could easily spend the entire summer exploring. Enjoy! ☀️