[Coco] MC6847 VGA (FPGA) Project underway...

[Zippster]

Well, one thing moved off of my plate this morning.  I have a Mini-MPI board in the mail
to John Strong so that he can design cases.  Can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
I’m considering development done on this project unless any bug fixes pop up.  
<https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1sgl615FlGnTV9Ib2xKSDNISXM <https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1sgl615FlGnTV9Ib2xKSDNISXM>>

I’m looking forward to turning much more focus to the CoCoVGA project hardware now
that we are so close with the FPGA programming.

I’ve started work on an optional companion board to the CoCoVGA that will allow for
software control of advanced features as well.  It’s essentially a fully buffered CPU upgrade
with a CPLD for address decoding and communications with the CoCoVGA board.

I know there’s a lot of neat features we’d like to put in as long as FPGA space holds out.

This is going to be really cool.  :D

- Ed


> On May 25, 2016, at 10:11 PM, Brendan Donahe <brendan at polylith.com> wrote:
> 
> Ron,
> 
> I just got PMODEs 0 and 2 working last weekend.  (That's RG2 and RG3 for
> the "purists" that follow the 6847 spec.)  All of the modes blessed by
> BASIC are working now.
> 
> I'm working on the modes that are not directly supported by BASIC, such as
> SG6, CG1, CG2, and RG1.  Thankfully, as of last weekend, I have a test
> framework and a small test suite from Steve Spiller, who also reminded me
> of William Barden's Color Computer Graphics book.  Together, these have
> made it simpler for me to enable some of the graphics modes to try them out
> and discover what is still broken in the FPGA design.  There are also still
> some other small issues that Simon Jonassen has helped me identify through
> his demos, but all-in-all, the project is coming along.
> 
> I have also gotten Ed a new FPGA image that should, in theory, be suitable
> for trying out the production boards - but I think you're right, Ed has a
> ton of hardware projects on his plate, so we will need to be patient.  ;)
> 
> Thanks for asking!
> 
> Brendan
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 9:37 PM, Ron Klein <ron at kdomain.org> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Ed / Brendan,
>> 
>> Any updates on this?  It was impressive as heck to see at CoCoFEST!
>> 
>> ... it's not as if Ed doesn't already have too many things going on ...
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> -Ron
>>