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  1. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  2. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

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

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  4. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  5. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  6. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  7. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  8. dlv

    Dual 600MHz Cube

    Wow, very cool!! :)  
  9. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  10. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  11. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  12. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  13. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  14. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  15. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    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...
  16. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    Hi - It’s a busy weekend so I haven’t had a chance to read or do much more research but on Friday evening, I think I found a cheap ($20) Chinese FPGA board on eBay that is comparable to the miniSpartan6+. It doesn’t have an HDMI port, so that will need to provided by the carrier board. That...
  17. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    I'll take a look at PDS but part of the motivation for me is doing this for a Quadra 950, which is the only 68k Mac I really care to collect. I imagine targeting the 68040 PDS is technically not any more difficult than targeting the 68030 PDS but there are likely to be other challenges, e.g...
  18. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    Thank you all for the discussion so far. You mean, interfacing with the VRAM built into the motherboard (or whatever)? I doubt Nubus/PDS has enough bandwidth to pull the contents of VRAM at any usable frame rate. A FPGA board providing its own frame buffer to the system and outputting the video...
  19. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    Yeah... I'm not that nostalgic for old CRTs (been there, done that). My focus is on the machine, so I think getting a crisp 1080p signal from a Q950 would be a fascinating way to interact with it  :)  
  20. dlv

    Development of Nubus graphics card outputting to HDMI?

    I came across the open source MNT VA2000 project last night (https://github.com/mntmn/amiga2000-gfxcard/tree/master) which brings HDMI output to the Amiga 2000.  Is anyone aware of a similar project or efforts for Apple Nubus?  It appears to me (naively) that the VA2000 could be leveraged for...
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