Homebrew microcomputers & video generation — #40

Post #40 by Bunsen

Source Forum	68kMLA
Category	Hardware
Post Date	Thu, 7 Mar 2013 - 12:28
Original URL	https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/homebrew-microcomputers-amp-video-generation.27426/

Post

Hey Grackle! Good to hear of your progress

The "caching" idea is that you can take a more relaxed approach: the Prop needs to grab one or two K inside of every 1/60th of a second window, but it could do it by, say, halting the CPU *once* and doing the transfer in one big chunk at the end of every vertical refresh cycle.

Ah ok, I'm with you now. That does sound elegant.

The cool thing about the Propeller, of course, is it's a fully general purpose CPU so in theory you could order it to do things like line/circle drawing, vectors, etc. (Also, you could wire a mouse to the Propeller and let the Prop completely handle the cursor generation, tracking, and even some of the high-level aspects of a GUI like window drawing and text handling. Think of it as a sort of Fisher-Price My First NeXT.)

Sound more like a My First XTerm to me - one device to handle the whole UI.

Or you could try driving an ISA video card.

This is ... interesting.

maybe make a single board computer with just a serial port for a console to start with. If you expose the CPU bus on an expansion connector, you can interface anything you like to it later on.

This too.