5 months ago
Two notes for the creator:
1) The CD4000 series is about the slowest logic family that's still on the market. Switching to anything else - 74LS, 74HC, take your pick - will improve your fMax dramatically.
2) Every IC on your board needs a decoupling capacitor as close to its power/ground pins as possible. Not having those is probably causing a lot of weird behavior, including the "interference" you're seeing from other devices.
5 months ago
Congrats on getting something that functions, despite the glitches, which are probably due to crosstalk and other noise over the rat's nest wiring.
5 months ago
Not my project; but I am curious about the vertical ghosting, as the only time I've seen that happen was with an LCD that had a failing column driver.
5 months ago
Great work. I miss the speed we had before graphics card were a thing. Everything was literally 100x faster to render. I wish we could bypass graphics card entirely on modern Oses and computers but it looks like it’s not even possible anymore with EUFI. I would buy a card that works for TUI only, and with a large set of Unicode chars, and works on a 6K screen.
5 months ago
Text mode actually needed a GPU to be fast, it just wasn't called that back in the day. It was dog slow on older hardware to render text in software, even from bitmaps.
5 months ago
> it just wasn't called that back in the day
Right, I think they were more just like "VGA cards" or "graphics adapters" for a while, and before that would have been CGA/EGA/Hercules, etc. I view the first GPUs as being those with 2D + 3D acceleration.
5 months ago
Really cool project, takes me back to the days browsing through Elektor home projects.
5 months ago
Perfect to play Nethack/Slashem :D :
https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii.html
50x18 chars... well, I've seen a patched Nethack for the Zipit Z2 (altough you can perfectly set a micro-font being able to fit a whole standard 80x24/25 char screen).
5 months ago
Brilliant! I think all the minor glitches give it character. A perfectly clean text output would be boring, but this looks really cool.
5 months ago
I agree, I like the noisy signal. It gives "this is running on a breadboard" which is much cooler than bit-perfect output.
5 months ago
How do you handle them latching the wrong way and letting out the magic smoke? Built into the chips?
5 months ago
We could tie it to an error signal from the OS or prompt, so that if `$?` is non-zero then the magic smoke is released. This would encourage careful programming.
5 months ago
This is very cool! I like the idea of a real text-mode card for a homebuilt PC versus the more framebuffer-like card that Ben designed. Nice work. I also like the natural progression from text to Pikachu. :D
5 months ago
Nice to see support for Standard Galactic Alphabet.
5 months ago
De. Cou. Pling. Caps!
The number of issues you'll face that you'll NEVER be able to explain without them is ... not small...