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

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.

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em3rgent0rdr 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	userbinator 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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M4R5H4LL 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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baq 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	accrual 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

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pjmlp 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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anthk 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

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fancyfredbot 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	accrual 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, I like the noisy signal. It gives "this is running on a breadboard" which is much cooler than bit-perfect output.

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accrual 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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privatelypublic 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	accrual 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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Shadowmist 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nice to see support for Standard Galactic Alphabet.

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dmitrygr 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

De. Cou. Pling. Caps!

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