This paper describes a bioinspired preprocessing and coding system devised for producing optimal multi-electrode stimulation at the cortical level, starting from image sequences and working at video rates. A hybrid platform with software and reconfigurable hardware delivers a continuously varying stream of pulses or spike patterns. The main objective of this work is to build a portable system for a visual neuro-prosthesis to stimulate efficiently an array of intra-cortical implanted microelectrodes. A set of parameters can be adjusted in the processing and spike-coding modules to trade-off their technology constraints with the biological plausibility of their functional features.