[Coco] Run of RGB2VGA boards

[Steven Hirsch]

On Sun, 16 Aug 2015, Salvador Garcia wrote:

> On the other hand, the Arduino is a microcontroller based computer that 
> just runs code. Of course, given enough code, any processor based 
> product could be used to convert the RGB signals to VGA, but I suspect 
> that the Arduino just does not have the necessary hardware resources to 
> accomplish this task.

There is at least one project using a BeagleBone Black for video 
conversion.  The TI SOC part has two PRUs (Programmable Realtime Unit) 
which offer 100% deterministic timing (no call stack, 1 clock per 
instruction).  At 200Mhz. these are fast enough to do video processing.

An Arduino, rPi (or the BBB main CPU for that matter) are not well suited 
to this type of signal processing.

Another interesting project using the BBB PRU is David Gesswein's MFM disk 
reader/emulator:

http://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/mfm.shtml

Here the PRUs are doing MFM data stream decoding and encoding.

For $50, the BBB is one powerful piece of hardware.


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