Recent content by dlv

Thanks. That read more like marketing for the 8*24 GC but was still interesting. What I was looking for is Imaging With QuickDraw (PDF), which I highly recommend since it has answered a lot of questions already.  A quick search revealed Apple donated the source code of the 68000 QuickDraw...

Yes. And a shift register is a much better/cleaner idea.

Yeah. Well, a big part of what I want to get out of this, is to learn about FPGAs and FPGA logic design. Any plans with ARM would be way down the line. Perhaps soft cores might be worth looking into for QuickDraw acceleration later? Where might one read more about that? Yes. It might be worth...

I wanted to elaborate my thinking: I think true color is actually a natural choice to target at the beginning because it's what the HDMI TMDS encoder takes as input. Supporting B&W would require extra FPGA logic to stream 1-bit pixels and convert them into a 24-bit pixels to feed into the...

Yeah, I find myself going back to a NuBus design: Easier than I expected to understand (so far). E.g., after a few hours tonight, I understand, at least at a high level, how single transaction reads and writes work.  Maybe avoid having to re-read the Motorola MC68030 manual for now. It's not...

A little bit... After a quick Google search, it appears the Spartan 6 doesn't quite support 1080p at 60Hz. And in fact, I see now the VA2000 lists 1080p @ 30Hz support as experimental. This is not a show stopper, of course. There is still plenty to learn.  It appears Lukas is developing a...

My guess is since the FPGA is going to spend the majority of its time reading from the framebuffer and pushing pixels, that needs to be really fast or at least take priority. One way to make it fast is to use techniques like burst reads from RAM, which we may not be able to take advantage of if...

Wow, very cool!! :)  

Oh hmm... I dismissed the need to support CLUTs (my own interest is in true color at 1080p) but that totally makes sense for a general purpose video card. I recall someone suggested this earlier in the thread. I agree it could be worthwhile for hints and testing assumptions in software. Perhaps...

That's exactly the same conclusion I have come to regarding a PDS design vs NuBus design. I read through a good chunk of the Motorola 68030 manual two years ago to try to understand what would be involved with creating a quad-processor homebrew 68030 computer (entirely too ambitious), but it has...

Well, if only because these machines are well documented in documentation accessible to me. I suspect the number of available I/O pins on my FPGA board is likely to dictate the decision between NuBus and PDS. State machines appear to be natural to implement in a FPGA so the prospect of...

Hi all - I'm sorry I've been remiss posting updates. At this point, I have the FPGA, its JTAG programmer, and development environment (on my Windows 10 machine) all working. I'm able to upload and write bitstreams, get LEDs to turn on with the push of the a button, etc. All the basics I had...

Not a whole lot from me. Work has been demanding a lot of my time as deadlines approach. The FPGA and USB programmer arrived last week but I need to source a 5V power supply to begin playing with it. In the meantime, I've been learning about TMDS encoding (used in DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort) and...

I've begun working on a schematic of the HDMI daughter board for the QMTECH FPGA, but I'm realizing that if I'm going to have PCBs made, it would make a lot of sense to wire in PDS (or NuBus), and save money and time... Guess I'll need to catch up and read the documentation you've all...

QMTECH's XC6SLX16 board available for sale from many vendors on eBay such as: https://www.ebay.com/itm/XC6SLX16-Spartan-6-Xilinx-FPGA-Development-Board-w-Micro-SDRAM-Memory-32Mb/264229717341 You can find the schematics, documentation for the board and its components, and example code FPGA...