2D Graphics Thingy?
Maybe 3D Graphics Thingy isn’t dead after all. One of my goals for the creation of Tiny CPU was to get more comfortable with programmable logic design, and custom circuit board development, and I’ve certainly done that. Once Tiny CPU is done, I think I’m going to revisit graphics in the form of “2D Graphics Thingy”. My plan would be to work through the memory interface problems that stumped me the first time, and create something like a programmable 2D blitter for a VGA frame buffer. That seems like a manageable project I could expect to succeed at, while also being a step along the way toward the ultimate goal of 3DGT.
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Seems like a good step forward towards your goal.
Milkymist SoC (www.milkymist.org) has a working DDR SDRAM controller, plus 2D texturing accelerator (can be modified for 3D), VGA output and other goodies. Why not use it as a base?
I am thinking of the same sort of thing. I created a VGA 640×480 2bit frame buffer and looking at your BMOW 1 I see many similarities, except I handled the Timings etc with an SX28, rather then CPLD (I guess what ever you have a programmer for).
But the whole striping of 8 bits off of a latch and displaying it, thus freeing the bus and 6 lines of a mux to do other things got me thinking of what else could be done with those 6 lines. Initially i thought just fetching and storing to the video ram, making the vram appear to be really slow ram. Later I was thinking of implementing a small language to do video operations. In fact, after thinking this way, and investigating the ‘custom chips’ of the 80s (fat agnus on the amiga) I realize they came up with this as well.
I realize that most of the fun is coming up with this ourselves, but reading about the ‘language’ of the amiga’s graphics systems clued me into how a small 4 function language could be incredibly useful in graphics operations.
I’m going to just try the ‘incredibly slow ram’ idea first, because I agree its best working incrementally.
John
Seems like a good step forward towards your goal.go like that
I have some interresting VHDL code perhaps since i have been working on a reimplementation of the Amiga chipset.(not the MiniMig)
I would Love to see some of your reseach into the matter since i am being too bogged down implementing to do research in improvements.