Skyler Schneider at Cornell University has produced a very comprehensive description of a falling sand game project using an Altera Cyclone II on the DE2 dev board. The Verilog source code listings demonstrate the level of coding required to produce dynamic video representations in a gaming environment.
Schneider’s project is a good reminder that real-time graphics on constrained hardware is still one of the more rewarding corners of FPGA work. The same Cyclone II family has been used in university labs to prototype everything from retro arcade clones to slot-machine display controllers, and the rendering constraints are tighter than anything you’d encounter building a Florida online casino front end or a mobile weather app. For anyone looking to sharpen their Verilog skills on a visual project, falling sand is a solid starting point.