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Home Forums 68kMLA Why the unusual frequency? — #16
Post #16 by Gorgonops
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryHardware
Post DateTue, 3 Nov 2009 - 22:11
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/why-the-unusual-frequency.18919/
Post
Just again out of curiosity, what other projects have you done with a propeller? It doesn't look like it's actually *that* trivial to add high-speed external RAM to one. (Unless I'm misunderstanding the documentation/forum discussions on the matter it looks like you can dedicate I/O pins to bit-banging an external parallel RAM chip or bus but the Prop I doesn't natively support "memory operations" or DMA to such a setup. The source code for the 6502 laptop is *very* interesting reading...) Most (all) of the "high-res" video drivers I've seen referenced are tile based and the 32K internal RAM seems to be a fairly hard limit. Has anyone actually implemented a bigger-than-32K linear framebuffer driver before?

Unless you're supremely confident in your design and done video work before I'd probably aiming for the simple scandoubler as an "alpha" design and working upward from there, since it sounds like everything you need for the most part is already present inside the propeller. (It may well work fine on most newer LCDs anyway. I've had trouble before with elderly LCD monitors not working with "oddball-by-PC-standards" scan rates produced by Sun Workstations and whatnot, but newer monitors seem to have more flexible scalers and will manage to produce a usable image out of most any input.)

But, hey, if you're a Propeller God go for the gold.

mp.ls