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Re: Another idea for outputting to VGA/DVI/HDMI
On 2013-03-26 11:14:35 +0000, Steve Nickolas said:
On Tue, 26 Mar 2013, Steve wrote:
The ARM idea has been around for a while. Its just a little top heavy
and maybe "way overkill" for an elegant solution. This board
http://www.srkhdesigns.com/images/ARM7+A2E.JPG takes a Texas
Instruments OMAP3530 processor (in the form of a gumstix) and
interfaces its AHB bus with the Apple II's bus. Voltage translation
and bidirectional buffers are provided for read/write as well as
"wait" to sync with the slow apple bus. It has an LCD interface, a
HDMI interface and a SVGA interface (along with the usual plethora of
integrated interfaces these processors have) that it then pipes the
processed video data out onto. The linux requirements and the code
needed to have it up and running sunk it.
I know someone who implemented an XT clone on an 8052-compatible
microcontroller, with a PCB about the size of a 3.5" floppy. He's got
some sort of system with a slower version of the same processor and a
smaller board and I bet even that would be plenty enough for the job.
Yeah, no doubt the BB is way overkill for the project. The main reason I
like it is that it is easily available and not too expensive.
Any other board would be a good choice too as long as it had enough I/O
to interface with the bus and is easily available for purchase.
It would be, in some way, totally silly to have a fairly powerful board
running linux just sitting in an Apple II acting as a video card, but on the
other hand, if it works, I'd get over it.