There's another example here http://geoffg.net/terminal.html that gives 80 x 24 (ish) into VGA and 44 x 15 (NTSC) or 48 x 18 (PAL) to composite. It uses a through-hole ATMEL chip - does that count?

Something that's been in the back of mind is to see if, rather than communicating via the serial is to use it as a memory mapped device - perhaps with some wait state generation from Daryl's web site.

My particular obsession is with a relatively unknown (outside of the UK) system called the Microtan 65 (from a company called Tangerine) which clocked the CPU at 750kHz and had a discrete logic video generation of 32 x 16. There was an add-on board available which used a stand-alone 6502 running at 2MHz, communicating via a couple of bytes in the memory map to give 80 x 25.

There are a couple of people who are re-casting the original designs using 'modern' replacement components only where absolutely necessary as well as providing lots of information, including circuit diagrams or both the original and new boards. They can be found at http://www.microtan.ukpc.net/. Their latest board is a 'high resolution graphics' card (as called by Tangerine back in the 80s) that gives a 256 x 256 pixel graphics board!

Simon

How would I connect the arduino uno to the VIA chip, (im pretty new to the whole, major circuit designing thing.) I am looking at The First Great 6502 Project, and I will check out the second project with the LCD [...] What would you mean Bit-bang and how would i do it?

The UART that i am using is the MAX3100 chip, and it has TX and RX pins, should i connect it to that just to test it out. I dont have the components til tuesday, so I will have to wait till then but in the mean time I could program the Arduino UNO to accept the data from the UART. Is that even practical? I mean i know the UART can talk using Serial data, but to use it to transmit Video commands? I dont know... I am working on making the Arduino Into a video card with a fan and heat sink (I know its a lil overkill, but it will hot a lil...)

Seems like there is enough demand for someone to come up with a CPLD video chip solution. I know FPGA would be bigger/faster but seems like an ATF1508 (which can handle 5V) and some SRAM could become a VGA framebuffer.

That's what I hope to build when my CPLD/HDL skills get better.

I don't believe the P2 is fully available yet, is it? I know there have been some runs of a development board from Parallax. But they are around $150 IIRC.

One of the forum members created a small dev board (I have one) that I think is pretty cheap but very limited in quantity. The board I have isn't populated and I don't have the actual P2 chip yet.

The P2 could be a major contender for many things. Especially people who don't want to go FPGA but still need some major power (and a simple language that doesn't require expensive licenses).

I have 50 of the new RevB P2 chips and about 15 of RevA as well as 3 eval boards and my P2D2 modules plus I can order more chips as needed at this stage. Creating a small pcb to handle NTSC/VGA/HDMI is very simple to do.