Thanks - that is interesting to hear. We have occassionally been pondering about doing a product box, and/or physical driver/utilities floppy disks. Another idea that I had been playing around in my head was to redistribute my "CRT Terminator enabled" fork of https://github.com/juj/foray_in_the_forest/ on a disk. Though so far we haven't quite jumped on making anything in this area.

clb wrote on 2025-05-13, 22:49:

Thanks - that is interesting to hear. We have occassionally been pondering about doing a product box, and/or physical driver/utilities floppy disks. Another idea that I had been playing around in my head was to redistribute my "CRT Terminator enabled" fork of https://github.com/juj/foray_in_the_forest/ on a disk. Though so far we haven't quite jumped on making anything in this area.

Well one thing that can be done /should be done is to have a single zip file with the essential utilities for easy download. That way people can just get one file and get everything they need.

Very cool pic! That sad slimy Varta is a nice touch 😁

Very interested to see what you have come up with!

Today I successfully tested the CRT Terminator with my Trident 2MB VLB graphics card. Lots of games and a few demos. No problems so far.

Hello clb, I would like to join the order queue for CRT Terminator but the order form on the website is not working for me. Any help with ordering appreciated.

Hi duri,

it looks like something got hung with HTTPS certificate in the database server. I've updated the script now, can you try again to see if it works?

clb wrote on 2025-07-25, 07:26:

Hi duri,

it looks like something got hung with HTTPS certificate in the database server. I've updated the script now, can you try again to see if it works?

Hi Clb, yes thank you that worked and received email to confirm.

@clb, any update on that new firmware?

Hey, thanks for pinging. It is still in the pipes and coming. I tried to get it out the door before end of June, though then had a surprise two week work trip, and went on overtime holiday after that. In July I took a break from PC stuff altogether to unwind a bit.

Now reading back the message thread here, when I wrote the earlier message, I remember I thought I was in a "I'll get this out in a week" stage, but, of course that's how these things go..

The next firmware will come with a new GUI based settings utility, which is where the majority of the development has gone into. The card adds new internal diagnostics items that allow testing the different board features, and configuring its usage. There is one more item I am working on to add into the utility, after which everything should be good to go. Now that I am back to work, Hopefully only a week or two. Fingers crossed.

Sounds great. Looking forward to it. Make any progress on scaling options?

I ran experiments on that in April and May, but unfortunately that did not result in anything that would have panned out. It is definitely difficult to implement that to fit on this FPGA board.

Working great with an ARK1000PV. I do have a feature request - some interesting displays (INNOCN OLED) do not have an aspect ratio setting and they always scale to the full display. Could CRT Terminator please support fixing the aspect ratio for wide aspect output resolutions? Thanks!

Hey Furan, really great to hear that ARK1000PV is matching well. That is one of my favorite - if not the favorite - graphics adapter to use with CRT Terminator, because it is able to output 15-bit/16-bit and 24-bit video modes in a manner that is compatible with CRT Terminator.

Outputting fixed 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios have come up, I have an Asus PA328QV display that is unable to do a "force to 4:3 aspect ratio" option, so having CRT Terminator show a 4:3 image output to 16:9 mode would assist that display.

Unfortunately the main issue here is that the FPGA is out of dedicated hardware adders that would be able to keep up at the high video pixel clock domain, so being able to include an accumulator that would perform the different scaling, is unable to fit 😒

The other challenge is that outputting black pillarboxes left and right side of the output images will consume video pixel bandwidth, and the 118.8MHz max video pixel clock limit comes up easier in that mode, so max resolution or refresh rate would need to be sacrificed. It is a bit of a world of tradeoffs unfortunately.

Thanks - the only thing I can think of is what resources you'd get back by disabling the debug overlay feature for the release build.

There is indeed one hardware adder in use there, and I've pondered if nuking that would be a possibility. Much of the same data shown in the debug overlay is accessible via the ISA bus, and critical to software configuration and diagnosis, so not all the resources would be recoupable.

Although using CRT Terminator without the overlay is a very "have to be intimately familiar with the device" thing.. even I get lost with configuring resolutions, if I can't see the overlay.