INapGPU: Text-mode graphics card, using only TTL gates | Hacker News Reader

INapGPU: Text-mode graphics card, using only TTL gates

github.com

92 pointsuserbinator15 comments

Two notes for the creator:

1) The CD4000 series is about the slowest logic family that's still on the market. Switching to anything else - 74LS, 74HC, take your pick - will improve your fMax dramatically.

2) Every IC on your board needs a decoupling capacitor as close to its power/ground pins as possible. Not having those is probably causing a lot of weird behavior, including the "interference" you're seeing from other devices.

Congrats on getting something that functions, despite the glitches, which are probably due to crosstalk and other noise over the rat's nest wiring.

Not my project; but I am curious about the vertical ghosting, as the only time I've seen that happen was with an LCD that had a failing column driver.

Great work. I miss the speed we had before graphics card were a thing. Everything was literally 100x faster to render. I wish we could bypass graphics card entirely on modern Oses and computers but it looks like it’s not even possible anymore with EUFI. I would buy a card that works for TUI only, and with a large set of Unicode chars, and works on a 6K screen.

Text mode actually needed a GPU to be fast, it just wasn't called that back in the day. It was dog slow on older hardware to render text in software, even from bitmaps.

> it just wasn't called that back in the day

Right, I think they were more just like "VGA cards" or "graphics adapters" for a while, and before that would have been CGA/EGA/Hercules, etc. I view the first GPUs as being those with 2D + 3D acceleration.

Really cool project, takes me back to the days browsing through Elektor home projects.

Perfect to play Nethack/Slashem :D :

https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii.html

50x18 chars... well, I've seen a patched Nethack for the Zipit Z2 (altough you can perfectly set a micro-font being able to fit a whole standard 80x24/25 char screen).

Brilliant! I think all the minor glitches give it character. A perfectly clean text output would be boring, but this looks really cool.

I agree, I like the noisy signal. It gives "this is running on a breadboard" which is much cooler than bit-perfect output.

How do you handle them latching the wrong way and letting out the magic smoke? Built into the chips?

We could tie it to an error signal from the OS or prompt, so that if `$?` is non-zero then the magic smoke is released. This would encourage careful programming.

This is very cool! I like the idea of a real text-mode card for a homebuilt PC versus the more framebuffer-like card that Ben designed. Nice work. I also like the natural progression from text to Pikachu. :D

Nice to see support for Standard Galactic Alphabet.

De. Cou. Pling. Caps!

The number of issues you'll face that you'll NEVER be able to explain without them is ... not small...

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