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Well… I bought an Arduino. Initially, the investment was motivated with something that would make my daughter interested in programming. However, as it turned out, this thing was more fun to play with for me.After playing around with making LED’s light up, button interaction and serial printing, I decided to set raise the bar a bit and actually make something. As one of my biggest interests is gaming it was naturally going to be something gaming-related, and therefore I decided to create my own little arcade machine. I quickly realized that the actual cabinet-building had to be a future project, and that I needed to focus on wrapping my head around programming with the limited resources that Arduino has to offer. So I decided that a good first game would be Snake.
In order to get started I had to wrap my head around how to solve input and display. For input I wanted a genuine arcade feeling, so I purchased an arcade joystick and buttons. Display was a bit trickier as I did not want to be limited to small TFT screens. I then found the awesome VGAX library by Sandro Maffiodo. However, since I had to solder my own VGA port, this meant that I had to revisit the art of soldering, something I’ve not done since school (more than 20 years ago).
So, without further talking, here is how I made my first Arduino project!”

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