Vera programmer

VERA Module

VERA (Versatile Embedded Retro Adapter) is a self-contained FPGA video and audio module for retro-computing projects. It provides tile and bitmap graphics, sprites, programmable audio, PCM playback, and SPI/SD-card access through a straightforward host interface.

This repository contains the hardware, FPGA design, host bridge, programmer, desktop GUI, and documentation needed to build and use the module.

[!NOTE] Upstream attribution and independence: Open VERA Module is a community-maintained fork of the original VERA Module created by Frank van den Hoef. It preserves the original project’s history and VERA compatibility goals, but is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official release of Frank van den Hoef or the original VERA project. See NOTICE and LICENSING.md for attribution and licensing details.

Highlights

• Two tile-or-bitmap graphics layers
• Up to 128 hardware sprites
• 256-entry colour palette
• PSG audio and PCM audio FIFO
• SPI interface with SD-card support
• Arduino Mega bridge and a Qt-based desktop test application

Repository layout

Quick start

FPGA firmware

The reproducible Docker build is the recommended way to generate a bitstream:

bash firmware/build-docker.sh

The resulting flashable image is written to firmware/build/vera.bin. See the firmware README for local-toolchain builds and timing reports.

Arduino Mega bridge

The bridge exposes VERA over USB serial using an Arduino Mega 2560. Compile and upload it with arduino-cli:

arduino-cli compile --fqbn arduino:avr:mega driver/src/vera_driver
arduino-cli upload --fqbn arduino:avr:mega --port <serial-port> driver/src/vera_driver

Consult the bridge documentation for the VERA bus pin mapping.

Desktop GUI

The GUI requires Qt 6 with the Widgets and SerialPort components. Configure and build it with CMake:

cmake -S driver/gui -B driver/gui/build
cmake --build driver/gui/build --parallel

On launch, the application attempts to connect to a detected bridge automatically; closing it resets the connected VERA module. The Windows installer is also available from the GUI installer workflow.

Documentation

Project documentation lives in docs/. The published documentation is built by GitHub Actions; its current status is shown above. Start with docs/index.rst for the table of contents.

Contributing

Contributions and issue reports are welcome. Please keep changes focused, include relevant build or test results, and follow the guidance in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

The project is licensed by component: maintained hardware designs are released under CERN-OHL-S-2.0 and maintained software under GPL-3.0-or-later. Historic upstream material remains MIT-licensed where marked. See LICENSING.md for the complete licence map and NOTICE for attributions.