Oh my god! I would love to play with this thing!

I was planning to make something similar but with one of the old MAX 7000 series CPLD devices.
This looks seriously impressive.

Also... how do you assembly those teeny little SMD parts? Do you do it yourself using something like reflow?

Pantheon wrote:

I was planning to make something similar but with one of the old MAX 7000 series CPLD devices.

Unfortunately, MAX7000 or similar is very limited - good for things like an address decoder, data latches etc only. With "real" FPGA you can do A LOT of different things that impossible with basic CPLD...

Pantheon wrote:

Also... how do you assembly those teeny little SMD parts? Do you do it yourself using something like reflow?

Actually, not really difficult after you got some experience and have proper tools. Whole thing (from empty PCB to working device) took around 1 hr. Use stencil to apply some solder paste, place parts using manual placer and put the PCB into reflow oven. Repeat for the top side 😀

Because of space limitations, had to use 0402 bypass capacitors for FPGA on the bottom side:

Ok, so you have a stencil and an oven... we can surely expect a bunch of those cards soon for us to buy? 😀

root42 wrote:

Ok, so you have a stencil and an oven... we can surely expect a bunch of those cards soon for us to buy? 😀

Sorry - it's just a hobby... And I have not tried to make a finished product - it's more about playing with a technology for test purposes...

If someone really interested to make them, I provide (of course, for free) all design files. But you have to be realistic - it's not cheap (8 layers PCB with relatively small clearances, FPGA chip etc) and not for someone without previous experience with BGA packages...

This is pretty cool !
I don't see a transmitter chip for HDMI, I suppose it relies on bitbanged TMDS ? Max10 IO aren't terribly fast, I wonder what is the max resolution one can reach. Ideally one would output panel native resolution to avoid latency and bad scaling that most monitors seem to have with low res content but 1920x1080 will be unreachable without Gbit transceivers.

Tiido wrote:

I don't see a transmitter chip for HDMI, I suppose it relies on bitbanged TMDS ? Max10 IO aren't terribly fast, I wonder what is the max resolution one can reach. Ideally one would output panel native resolution to avoid latency and bad scaling that most monitors seem to have with low res content but 1920x1080 will be unreachable without Gbit transceivers.

Theoretically, it's possible to go up to 80 MHz pixelclock using DDIO in MAX10. Practically I'm struggling right now with HDMI 🙁

80MHz is really low, I'm doing several hundred MHz IO on a Max10 and specs suggest 300ish MHz is no problem. True LVDS transmitter pins should be able to reach 700MHz which should be enough for medium resolutions, I'm not sure if you wired any of those to HDMI or not.

80MHz pixel clock - it’s 800MHz on the transmitters...
And yes - I used LVDS pins...

Right, now it makes sense. 8b/10b coming into play too. 800MHz is at the maximum for the chip...
IT6613 would be a choice for the transmitter chip, it is used by Open Source Scan Converter project. Register documentation I haven't been able to find but the source code would be a starting point to get good default values going.

Wow, this is really cool! 😁

6. RCA connector with the circuit from original CGA adapter - still trying to re-create cycle-accurate CGA, but don't have enough time for now...

Please don't forget to add 640x400 CGA mode of the Olivetti M24 machines, quite some Turbo Pascal programs could use it (there was a bgi file for it). 😀

That is all.

appiah4 wrote:

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That is all.

As I have explained already, for a number of reasons I don't make my projects for sale. If someone decides to produce and sell any of my projects, I give away all existing info for free and without any significant conditions.

You are such a killjoy... 😒

appiah4 wrote:

You are such a killjoy... 😒

Sorry 😀

If someone has skills and desire to develop IP cores/firmware for my projects, I can consider giving away a working card to that person.