The world's worst video card?

I'm actually more excited to see a new Ben Eater video on youtube than anything else. His stuff is just fantastic. Even though it's lower level than I've ever worked, it's extremely entertaining and educational. His 6502 series is just great, but I want to highlight another couple of videos he did: "Let's build a circuit that displays an image on a VGA monitor! In this video, I talk about how VGA signals work and build a circuit that provides the correct timing of sync signals so that a monitor recognizes the signal." ▶ this video

Ben Eater did a video on driving a VGA display using a breaboard circuit. He builds up to it in his usual amazing teaching style, highly recommend: ▶ this video

Ben Eater has a great video[1] about building a video card from simple gates and other basic components. It goes into some detail about how a VGA signal is generated. [1]: ▶ this video

Even further to that end of the spectrum is "The World's Worst Graphics Card"[1] on a breadboard with mostly discrete logic. Fascinating. [1] ▶ this video

Reminds me of Ben Eater's Youtube videos where he builds everything using basic gates on a breadboard. He made a video-card using ICs on a breadboard that fascinated me: ▶ this video

Maybe something like Ben Eater's video card series? ▶ this video If i remember correctly he assembles a gfx card on a bread board. So its fairly fundamental

This one might be interesting to you: ▶ this video “The world’s worst video card?” Ben builds a framebuffer display device on a bread board from scratch, you’ll understand what every transistor does at a high level in an hour (don’t miss part 2). That is abstractly what first principles graphics looked like some time ago - pixels were represented by a block of main memory, and the video system simply scanned that memory at the same frequency as the CRT monitor’s beam. I’d say it’s pretty important to remember that what counts as “first principles” graphics has changed over time, and there was a time before frame buffers (the first Pong game was displayed on an oscilloscope) and the way we use framebuffers today is completely different - there is no more direct access to pixels in the same way old terminals used to work. The article here is detailing how we use a higher level API to draw higher level primitives, and the hardware takes care of the pixels. I’d love to hear a little more about your goal... what’s driving you to study the old terminals?

Not the same thing, but you reminded me of this since it's in a similar vein. Ben Eater went through the entire process of building a VGA "video card." Anyone with a basic understanding of logic circuits has enough background to understand it. Worth a watch. Part 1: ▶ this video Part 2: link

Back in university, we took the steps of: - Breadboarding some CPU components - Breadboarding a very, very minimal CPU. More like a simple Adding + Multiplication machine with 4 registers or so, with a few premade components. - Eventually moving up to microcoding a simulated CPU - Eventually writing binary code to control the microcoded CPU - At that point I kinda cheated and wrote my own assembler because I got sick of checking so many bits. - This project then stopped at an assembly level. - But then we implemented our own ML-variant interpreter and later on ML-variant compiler in OCaml - And later on we had that ML-Compiler compile itself and extended it from there. Pick your poison where to start. Just be aware that breadboarding stuff becomes very... messy very quickly[1]. And I do include Hardware in this, because you needed simpler CPUs to design more complex CPUs. In practice, you want to pick the best combination of a familiar language that is as high level as it can be. But back in the day, that would've been assembly, binary. In the case of C, it went from BCPL, in which a compiler for B was written, in which a compiler for New B (NB) was written, which then turned into C. 1: ▶ this video

> I’m not quite sure what you mean by YouTubeisms The unending barrage of memes, the animations, floating emojis, the music constantly changing pace, the bright colors, "Youtube-voice", etc. etc. Compare it with Ben Eater building a video card: ▶ this video (of course the level of detail is higher but just focus on the style, voice, lack of animations and memes. He cracks a joke here and there, but isn't full of Youtubeisms.) And yes, it's a different genre. And yes, some people hate the genre that youtube is filled with these days.

Some what related: Ben Eater's video series on building a VGA graphics card. In there he calculates the resistors to show colors. ▶ this video

Ben Eater has some videos showing the USB protocol on an oscilloscope. link link And some videos on using chips and breadboards to meet protocols- ▶ this video And a digital protocol too- link