vga

137 Articles

Upgrade Your Voodoo With More Memory

April 4, 2023 by 23 Comments

In 1996, the 3Dfx VooDoo VGA chipset changed computer graphics forever. Because of the high cost of memory, most of the boards had only 4 MB of memory — which seemed a lot back then. However, the chipset could actually handle up to 8 MB. [Bits and Bolts] couldn’t stand that his board only had 4 MB, so he did what any good hacker would do: he figured out how to add the missing memory!

The mod has been done before using the “piggyback” technique, where you solder the new RAM chips on the old chips and bend out a few pins out to directly wire them to chip selects elsewhere on the board. [Bits and Bolts] didn’t want to try that, so instead, he developed a PCB that slips over the chip using a socket.

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EPROM Does VGA

March 29, 2023 by 16 Comments

If you wanted to create a VGA card, you might think about using an FPGA. But there are simpler ways to generate patterns, including an old-fashioned EPROM, as [DrMattRegan] points out in a recent video.

Generating video signals is an exercise in periodicity. After all, an old-fashioned CRT just scans at a certain horizontal frequency and refreshes the entire screen each time it starts over. VGA is made to drive this technology. An EPROM chip can easily generate repeating patterns when driven by a counter at a known frequency.

As you might expect, there were a few software glitches to work out, but in the end, the circuit did its job, displaying a fixed image on a VGA monitor.

If you haven’t run into [Matt] before, he has a complete series on how he built a “wire-by-wire” Apple II clone. We will warn you, though. Don’t click on the link unless you have some spare time. The 18 videos take over two hours to work through, but there is some beautiful prototyping and a lot of good information in them.

You can go even lower tech for a VGA card, if you like. Just try not to look like this breadboard.

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From A 6502 Breadboard Computer To Lode Runner And Beyond

January 17, 2023 by 2 Comments

As disruptive and generally unpleasant as the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 were, they often ended up being a catalyst for significant personal growth. That was often literal growth, thanks to stress eating, but others, such as [Eric Badger], used the time to add skills to his repertoire and build a breadboard 6502 computer and so much more.

For those of you looking for a single endpoint to this story, we’re sorry to disappoint — this isn’t really one of those stories. Rather, it’s a tale of starting as a hardware newbie with a [Ben Eater] 6502 breadboard computer kit, and taking it much, much beyond. Once the breadboard computer kit was assembled, [Eric] was hooked, and found himself relentlessly expanding it. At some point, he decided to get the classic game Lode Runner going on his computer; this led to a couple of iterations of video cards, including a foray away from the breadboards and into PCB design. That led to a 6502 emulator build, and a side quest of a Raspberry Pi Pico Lode Runner appliance. This naturally led [Eric] to dip a toe into the world of 3D printing, because why not?

Honestly, we lost track of the number of new skills [Eric] managed to add to his toolkit in this video, and we’re sure this isn’t even a final accounting — there’s got to be something he missed. It’s great stuff, though, and quite inspirational — there’s no telling where you’ll end up when you start messing around with hardware hacking.

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A smartphone-sized PCB is in a person's hand. A large blue chip package houses a 486 and the board has a SoundBlaster card and a 40 PIN Raspberry Pi Connector along one edge for attaching a Raspberry Pi Zero.

TinyLlama Is A 486 In Your Pocket

November 20, 2022 by 39 Comments

We love retrocomputing and tiny computers here at Hackaday, so it’s always nice to see projects that combine the two. [Eivind]’s TinyLlama lets you play DOS games on a board that fits in your hand.

Using the 486 SOM from the 86Duino, the TinyLlama adds an integrated Crystal Semiconductor audio chip for AdLib and SoundBlaster support. If you populate the 40 PIN Raspberry Pi connector, you can also use a Pi Zero 2 to give the system MIDI capabilities when coupled with a GY-PCM5102 I²S DAC module.

Audio has been one of the trickier things to get running on these small 486s, so its nice to see a simple, integrated solution available. [Eivind] shows the machine running DOOM (in the video below the break) and starts up Monkey Island at the end. There is a breakout board for serial and PS/2 mouse/keyboard, but he says that USB peripherals work well if you don’t want to drag your Model M out of the closet.

Looking for more projects using the 86Duino? Checkout ISA Sound Cards on 86Duino or Using an 86Duino with a Graphics Card.

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Colorful Split Keyboard Uses VGA Connections

November 19, 2022 by 14 Comments

When it comes to building a split keyboard, you have a lot of options when it comes to the cable. Many will use a standard 3.5 mm TRRS cable, and others might use something more esoteric like RJ-45 to run between the halves. This only works if you’re using two controllers; if you only want one controller, you have to pass the matrix from one side to the other, which typically requires more than the four wires offered by the aforementioned choices. While rummaging around, [Joe Scotto] found a VGA cable and thought, why not use that?

This lovely Barbie-themed peripheral is a split version of an earlier board he built called the ScottoFly, which is a monoblock split with a void in the middle. As with that one, this is hand-wired using thicc brass insulated with heat-shrink, uses a solid 3D-printed plate, and a printed case. And like a madman, [Joe] coiled the cable.

Unfortunately, this proved to be problematic in the wire breakage sense, or so he thought. The real problem turned out to be that the middle row of pins on a VGA connector all act like ground, so they can’t be used to pass rows and columns. However, there were still enough viable pins to send the 4×5 matrix across. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

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TRS-80 Gains Multiple Monitor Support, And High-Resolution Graphics

September 24, 2022 by 25 Comments

To call [Glen Kleinschmidt] a vintage computing enthusiast would be an understatement. Who else would add the ability to control and address multiple VGA monitors to a rack-mounted TRS-80 Model 1? Multiple 64-color 640×480 monitors might not be considered particularly amazing by today’s standards, but for 70s-era computing, it’s a different story.

Drawing this sin(x)/x ripple surface can be done in only 17 lines of BASIC.

How does a TRS-80 even manage to output anything useful to these monitors? [Glen] wrote his own low-level driver in machine code to handle that. The driver even has useful routines that are callable from within BASIC, meaning that programs written on the TRS-80 are granted powerful drawing abilities. Oh, and did we mention that the VGA graphics cards themselves were designed and made by [Glen]?

Interested in making your own? [Glen] provides all the resources you’ll need to re-create his work, including machine code drivers and demonstration BASIC programs as downloadable audio files, just as they would have been on original cassette tapes.

Watch things in action in the videos embedded below. The first draws a Land Rover, and the second plots a simple Moiré pattern star. Not bad for 70s-era hardware and 74xx logic!

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Z80 Single-Board Computer Looks Like It Could Have Been A Killer Product

August 20, 2022 by 30 Comments

Most retrocomputer builds seem to focus on either restoring old machines or rebuilding them from scratch. Either way, the goal is to get as close as possible to the original machine, and while we certainly respect those builds, there are other ways to celebrate the computers of yesterday, as this Z80 single-board computer nicely demonstrates.

[Ivan Farafontov]’s SBC is sort of a “Z80 that never was” build, one that would almost have been possible back in the heyday of 8-bit computing, and would have made quite a splash if it had. Most of the peripheral chips are from Zilog and would have been found in many of the Z80 machines of the day, like the TRS-80 and ZX Spectrum. Where it goes off the old-school path is with the video section, which uses an Atmel CPLD chip and a dual-port RAM to drive a VGA monitor. It still looks the part, though, with a 256×192 pixel, 16-color display. The compact video section helps keep the overall footprint of this machine pretty small, at least by the standards of the old machines. The machine is barely larger than its custom keyboard, which is populated with mechanical switches and really nice-looking custom keycaps, and everything fits into a 3D-printed case.

The demo that starts at the 4:30 mark of the video below will be a nostalgia storm for a lot of readers, starting as it does with a version of Boulder Dash that [Ivan] wrote from scratch, along with the tile editor he used to create the sprites for the game. All the design files and code are available if you want to build your own, of course. We recently featured another Z80 that never was, but [Ivan]’s machine really makes a statement with its compact size and its capabilities.

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