Category Archives: vga

Pac-Man Fever Comes to the Pano Logic FPGA

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If you’ve been reading Hackaday for a while now, you might recall the tale of Pano Logic that we first covered all the way back in 2013. They were a company that put out some very interesting FPGA-based thin clients, but as occasionally happens in situations like this, the market wasn’t ready and the company went belly up. These thin clients, now without official support, invariably got dumped onto the second-hand market. Shame for Pano Logic and their staff, but good news for hackers like [Skip Hansen].

After seeing a few posts about the Pano Logic devices and general FPGA …read more

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Atari Lynx Becomes Modern 2600 Console Homage

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With its introduction in 1989, the Atari Lynx was the first handheld videogame system to include a color LCD. The gigantic size and equally gigantic price tag did not win-over a massive audience, but that doesn’t mean the Lynx was without its fans. Over the past few months a modder named [Jared] has been toiling away with his project to transform an Atari Lynx into a home console.

The inspiration behind the mod was the original Atari console, the Atari 2600. [Jared’s] console mod, called the Atari Lynx 2600, utilizes a four-switch 2600 case as an enclosure. However, since the …read more

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Spoofing Cell Networks with a USB to VGA Adapter

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RTL-SDR brought cheap and ubiquitous Software Defined Radio (SDR) to the masses, opening up whole swaths of the RF spectrum which were simply unavailable to the average hacker previously. Because the RTL-SDR supported devices were designed as TV tuners, they had no capability to transmit. For the price they are still an absolutely fantastic deal, and deserve to be in any modern hacker’s toolkit, but sometimes you want to reach out and touch someone.

Now you can. At OsmoDevCon [Steve Markgraf] released osmo-fl2k, a tool which allows transmit-only SDR through cheap USB 3.0 to VGA adapters based on the Fresco …read more

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Eavesdropping on a VGA Monitor’s Conversations

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Did you ever wonder what your monitor and your computer are talking about behind your back? As it turns out, there’s quite a conversation going on while the monitor and the computer decide how to get along, and sniffing out VGA communications can reveal some pretty fascinating stuff about the I²C protocol.

To reverse engineer the configuration information exchanged between a VGA monitor and a video card, [Ken Shirriff] began by lopping a VGA cable in two. The inside of such cables is surprisingly complex, with separate shielding wires for each color and sync channel and a host of control …read more

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FPGA Magic Puts Little Embedded Screens Up On The Big Screen

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Old-school handheld gaming platforms have a certain charm, but it’s fair to say that their relatively tiny screens don’t lend themselves to wider viewing. This presented a problem to [uXe] who wanted to display Arduboy games on the big screen, so he took a MyStorm BlackIce FPGA board and created a converter that emulates a SSD1306 OLED display and has a VGA output.

Having proved the viability of the idea, it was ported to a dedicated PCB with onboard ancillaries such as a level shifter for a 5 volt input. In an exciting twist, with a few modifications it’s also …read more

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Racing The Beam On An ATtiny

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For the last thirty or so years, the demoscene community has been stretching what is possible on computer systems with carefully crafted assembly and weird graphical tricks. What’s more impressive is hand-crafted assembly code pushing the boundaries of what is possible using a microcontroller. Especially small microcontrollers. In what is probably the most impressive demo we’ve seen use this particular chip, [AtomicZombie] is bouncing boing balls on an ATtiny85. It’s an impressive bit of assembly work, and the video is some of the most impressive stuff we’ve ever seen on a microcontroller this small.

First, the hardware. This is just …read more

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FPGA Makes ASCII Video

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Human beings like pictures which is probably why there’s the old adage “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” We take computer graphic output for granted now, but even in the earliest days for Teletypes and line printers, there was artwork made from characters ranging from Snoopy to Spock. [Wenting Z] continues the tradition by creating an FPGA that converts VGA video to ASCII art and outputs it via DVI.

The device uses a Xilinx Virtex device and uses about 500 LUT (look up tables) which is not much at all. You can see a video (that includes an overlay of …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: PaperBack Desktop ePaper Monitor

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When we announced the Hackaday Prize with its Best Product category, [PK] polled his wife and co-workers about the idea of making a desktop monitor using 6″ 800×600 ePaper, which he has since built and calls the PaperBack. One such requirement for a monitor is to be able to connect to it using one of the usual desktop methods: VGA, DVI or HDMI. Given his previous experience making his own VGA card for the 2015 prize, he went with that. HDMI is in the works.

But it ended up being more than a desktop monitor. He first made a power …read more

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FPGA Rescues Scope From The Dumpster

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I’m always on the lookout for a quality addition to my lab that would respect my strict budget. Recently, I’ve found myself pushing the Hertz barrier with every other project I do and hence desperately wanted a high bandwidth scope. Unfortunately, only recently have 70 MHz to 100 MHz become really affordable, whilst a new quad channel oscilloscope in the 500 MHz to 1 GHz range still costs a fortune to acquire. My only option was to find an absolute miracle in the form of an old high bandwidth scope.

It seemed the Gods of Hand Me Down electronics were …read more

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The Modern Retrocomputer: An Arduino Driven 6845 CRT Controller

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[MmmmFloorPie] revived an old project to create the retro mashup of a 6845 CRT controller and a modern Arduino Uno. When it comes to chips, the Motorola 6845 is the great granddaddy of Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) interfaces. It was used in the IBM Monochrome display adapter, the Hercules graphics controller, CGA, Apple II terminal cards, and a host of other microcomputer and terminal systems.

Way back in 1989, [MmmmFloorPie] was a senior in college. His capstone project was a 68000 based computer which could record and playback audio, as well as display waveforms on a CRT. The CRT in …read more

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