Some Pleasing Experiments In 8-Bit Video Cards

October 3, 2021 by 13 Comments

These days, supply chain factors and high demand have made it incredibly difficult to lay one’s hands on a GPU. However, if you’re into older computers, you might find it hard to source old-school video cards too. Fear not, for [Dave’s Dev Lab] has been cooking up some experiments with a goal of eventually producing a new 8-bit ISA video card from scratch.

The long term goal is to recreate the original design of early IBM hardware, namely, the MDA and CGA video cards of decades past. The experiments center around the venerable Motorola 6845 which was widely used in computers in the 1980s. However, [Dave] intends to make them suitable for outputting to modern screens using typical VGA and DVI outputs, as well as those expected by modern TFT LCDs.

Thus far, [Dave] has achieved successful VGA output in a 40×35 text mode. With an 8×16 font, and the display running at 640×480 resolution at 60 Hz, everything hums along nicely. Similar experiments with a modern 480×272 LCD display have also worked well.

There’s a long way to go before [Dave’s] hardware is playing Commander Keen, but it’s great to see such effort being put into the platform. It could yet serve as a great upgrade for those wishing to use their vintage IBM metal without having to source a tired old CGA monitor.

We’ve seen similar work before too, with the Graphics Gremlin from [Tube Time] achieving a similar task. If you’ve been brewing up your own ISA hardware at home, do drop us a line.

Low Res Video Card Is Still Amazing Since It’s Made Out Of Logic Chips

July 7, 2019 by 33 Comments

[Ben Eater] has been working on building computers on breadboards for a while now, alongside doing a few tutorials and guides as YouTube videos. A few enterprising hackers have already duplicated [Ben]’s efforts, but so far all of these builds are just a bunch of LEDs and switches. The next frontier is a video card, but one only capable of displaying thousands of pixels from circuitry built entirely on a breadboard.

This review begins with a review of VGA standards, eventually settling on an 800×600 resolution display with 60 MHz timing. The pixel clock of this video card is being clocked down from 40 MHz to 10 MHz, and the resulting display will have a resolution of 200×150. That’s good enough to display an image, but first [Ben] needs to get the horizontal timing right. This means a circuit to count pixels, and inject the front porch, sync pulse, and back porch at the end of each horizontal line.

To generate a single horizontal line, [Ben]’s circuit first has to count out 200 pixels, send a blanking interval, then set the sync low, and finally another blanking interval before rolling down to the next line. This is done with a series of 74LS161 binary counters set up to simply count from 0 to 264. To generate the front porch, sync, and back porch, a trio of 8-input NAND gates are set up to send a low signal at the relevant point in a horizontal scan line.

The entire build takes up four solderless breadboards and uses twenty logic chips, but this isn’t done yet: all this confabulation of chips and wires does is step through the pixel data for the horizontal and vertical lines. A VGA monitor detects it’s in the right mode, but there’s no actual data — that’ll be the focus of the next part of this build where [Ben] starts pushing pixels to a monitor.

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Pi Zero Video Card Via Bare Metal Programming

January 17, 2016 by 10 Comments

Rolling your own synthesizer is no small feat, which is what [Thomas] has taken on with his project “Nerdsynth”. [Thomas] has an impressive amount of data on his site covering the overall design and progress of the project, but that isn’t what piqued our interest. [Thomas] has an on-board TFT display to navigate the versatile Nerdsynth’s menu nerdsynth-sketchbut he wanted to add video output to  do some video sequencing. After some investigation and poking around the available options he decided to tackle yet another sub-project (textbook scope-creep).

[Thomas] chose to do to some bare metal programming on the Pi Zero to use it as a video card for video output. By following a tutorial  from Valvers and modifying an SPI driver from Microelecroniki he was able to clone the video on an external monitor. This is a step in the right direction and we’ll have to keep an eye on his site for updates about video sequencing on the external display.

You can check out a recent demo of the Nerdsynth in action after the break, sadly you’ll have to settle for a pic of the cloned screen (below) until [Thomas] posts another update.

nerdsynth_tv-942x707

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THP Entry: A CPLD Video Card With VGA And NTSC

August 6, 2014 by 24 Comments

NTSC

[PK] is working on a very simple video card, meant to output 640×480 VGA with a cheap CPLD. The interface will be 5 Volt SPI, meaning there’s a ton of potential here for anyone wanting put a reasonable (and cheap) display in a microcontroller project. The project has come a long way, and his latest update showcases something that has only been done once before: color NTSC with programmable logic

The brains of the outfit is a $5, 100-pin CPLD from Xilinx. Apart from that, the rest of the components are a crystal, PLL, and an almost hilarious number of resistors for the R2R ladder. The one especially unique component is the 25.056815 MHz crystal – multiply by that by two, and it’s fast enough to drive a VGA monitor. Divide the crystal by seven, it’s the 3.579545 MHz you need for an NTSC colorburst frequency. That’s VGA and NTSC in a single programmable logic project, something the one FPGA project we could find that did color NTSC couldn’t manage.

The next step in the project is designing a PCB and figuring out the code for the framebuffer. [PK] put up a demo showing off both VGA and NTSC; you can check that out below.

SpaceWrencherThe project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

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STM32 Driving A PCIe Video Card

October 8, 2012 by 33 Comments

[Gpuhackr] chose his username to explain exactly how he spends his time. For instance, here he’s using an STM32 Discovery board to drive an AMD Radeon HD 2400 graphics card. The ARM microcontroller isn’t actually using the PCIe interface on the card. Instead, [Gpuhackr] has patched into the debugging interface built into the card itself. This isn’t quite as straight forward as it sounds, but if you do the wiring carefully it’s a pretty intersting way to connect an ARM to an LCD monitor.

This project would be almost impossible if it weren’t for the open source code which AMD has released. This lets him implement the card’s 3D rendering features. The demo directly programs the UVD Xtensa CPU which is on the video card. It draws a cube with color gradients on each side. The cube spins while the debug information is overlaid on the screen. In this case the ARM chip/board is really being used as a programmer to upload some custom firmware. But we think a real code-ninja could implement a communications protocol to open up a simple way to drive the card in real-time.

[Thanks uMinded]

A Masochistic Video Card

October 6, 2011 by 24 Comments

Have a penchant for pain? Why not destroy your fingertips with a wire-wrap tool building a video card made entirely out of discrete components.

When [Chris] decided to build an entry for the Dangerous Prototypes 7400 logic competition he already had his hands full. The 74xx chips he had on hand had a maximum clock frequency of 25MHz, but the VGA pixel clock runs at 40MHz. dividing the H sync timing by 4 means the maximum speed required of the video card is only 10MHz, albeit with a reduced resolution.

The video card was constructed on perfboard with wirewrap sockets. An 8-bit DAC was included, allowing the card to display 256 separate colors but only the three primary lines were wired up to the VGA cable. As is, the card cycles through 8 different colors in a constant loop, not bad for a pile of chips.

VGA out has been done on everything from an ARM to an ATtiny, but rarely, if ever, has VGA been done with discrete components. While this video card may not be our first choice for bitcoin mining, it’s still a very impressive build. Check out the walk through video after the break.

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Six Monitors, One Video Card

September 21, 2009 by 66 Comments

6 displays 1 videocard

With most of us utilizing at least two monitors these days in our day to day operations, six monitors, while an awesome thought, might seem a little too excessive. After all, do we really have space for multiple video cards?

AMD has a new setup in their testing lab that is running six Dell 30inch displays at 7680×3200 through a video card holding six DisplayPort connectors.

Maximum PC has the scoop on the setup, and they say that this single GPU will be coming out on AMD’s DirectX 11 capable chips. Details are slim with the amount of video RAM, speeds and cost not known at present.

Think of the possibilities! Trade shows are one thing, but how about a video wall at home for gaming and movies? How would you use the six monitors shown above? Be sure to leave your ideas in the comments.