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scrapcomputing / MCEBlaster

A Pi Pico based MDA/CGA/EGA to VGA adapter
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new suggestions #5

Open emilen72 opened 1 month ago

emilen72 commented 1 month ago

Hi, very glad to see that great work!!!

I think that is even good for add vga output to all retrocomputer 8 bit with TTL rgb output 15khz (a sort of cga) and even console as Intellivision and Videopac and more :-)

What do you think about the idea of ​​using the clone purple versione of the pico? It's used a lot this days on many 8 bit related multicart because it has same number of pin but more gpio pin available, it has 16mb flash on board, it's 5v tolerant (no need of level shifter) it cost same as pico... the flash memory could be used to store many sync profile and resumed on demand to user. Ok I'm not a programmer, so free to tell me id I'm only a dreamer :-)

regards Emiliano

for references https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=337976 https://github.com/aotta/PiRTOII https://github.com/robinhedwards/A8PicoCart https://oshwlab.com/yannick.erb/Intellivision-Secam-RH-RGB-Mod_copy_copy

scrapcomputing commented 1 month ago

Thanks for reaching out.

Not sure how well it would work with RGB TTL, haven't looked into the spec. It may require some tweaks.

Regarding the purple Pico, I prefer working with the original one because it's the official product and it will be widely available for many years in the future. Not sure about the 5V tolerant claim, I don't see any level shifters on the board. Some people claim that the Pico itself is 5V tolerant, but it's certainly not rated as such.

What I am really excited about is the new Pico 2, which is a great fit for this project as it addresses the performance and RAM issues. I will work on a new version of this project once I get my hands on one :)