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I was perplexed by breadboard PCBs and assumed that the ingenious Asians were filling a demand created by clueless newbies. I now think that I could have saved some effort 15 years ago if they were commonly available. Actually, I'm now perplexed that 0.1 inch breadboards have been available for more than 50 years but matching PCBs have only become popular after numerous incompatible stripboard variants.

I don't know anything about the timeline of stripboard with power rails, but I recently came across this nifty guy:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0040 ... B1JT&psc=1

At $12, it's a bit pricy for one board, but I really like the layout.

I've been using this Radio Shack solder-type breadboard for analog circuits for about 40 years:

A nice thing about these is that you can get two or sometimes even three leads in one hole for dense analog circuits with lots of discrete components like 1/8W resistors and capacitors.

A few years ago when I first decided to get my feet wet I got one of those "ELEGO" "all the parts you'll ever need" kits from Amazon. Ever since then my breadboard projects have been powered either by a jumper wire from Blue April's backplane, or by one of these little guys:
It runs off of a 9V wall wart and is jumper configurable for 3.3v or for 5v. It's OK - but it is kind of a pain, in that it lifts off the board at random times, and it also takes up quite a bit of board space. Around the same time I got that "ELEGO" kit, I got a Jameco breadboard, because they're supposed to be very nice. Well, they are, but sadly the little power doohickey pictured above won't fit on the Jameco power rails. So ever since then I've used a BusBoard breadboard (which is also pretty good) and the nice Jameco breadboard stayed in the box.

On a luthiery forum I sometimes read, one of the contemporary master luthiers says "it's a poor workman who blames his tools... because a good workman doesn't have bad tools!" So in that spirit I decided to upgrade my breadboard situation before returning to my video timing project. I got the cheapest aluminum backed breadboard I could find ($20 on Amazon), switched out its low quality Chinese breadboard with my nice Jameco one, upgraded its extremely flimsy banana jacks with some nicer ones (I also had to give it taller legs to make room for the new nice banana jacks!) and got a 5v switching wall wart for it.
It seems that generating video timings from a ROM is well-trodden territory around here. As I started building, I discovered that George (gfoot) from right here on the 6502 forums had already done what I had in mind, and much more! I basically ended up duplicating cleanroom-style his "Simplest VGA circuit" https://hackaday.io/project/175434-worl ... ga-circuit. Mine's not quite identical, but it is close. Also, I ran into a few small problems and gave up the cleanroom idea and asked George some questions. Thanks for your help George!

I kind of like this slow-mo version (Slowest Video Card in the World?) with a bunch of LEDs I made for troubleshooting. The PCB on the left is a debounced button circuit for manually pulsing the clock. The spare breadboard on the right has a 555 timer circuit with a variable resistor so I can run it in bullet time, more or less.
But, it's only useful if it actually produces correct timings:
Here's the HSYNC signal at .05 uS x10 per division:
I think that's pretty good, especially given the length of the ground lead I had to use to get at the signal! I couldn't get my scope to trigger on VSYNC; I guess 60Hz is just too slow for it. Of course, the real question is not whether or not I think it's good, but whether a real monitor will accept it:
I have to admit that, even though I'm reinventing the wheel here, at this point I did a very undignified happy dance.

If it makes you dance, you must be having fun! That's the goal!

Love seeing the sync signals come in great! Are you using a ROM for timing signals? Using the same down-counter that George was using (I believe that was what he was doing)? Plans for color signals? Is this going to attached to Blue April?

Sorry, lots of questions! Very good to see, great job

Chad

Hi Chad! Yep, using a ROM for timing signals. I'm not that interested in color or bit-map graphics, I want a text terminal, so I have VBLANK and HBLANK in addition to HSYNC and VSYNC. The counters are 74HC590s, which I think is the same as George used.

I think, in the long run, I might give Blue April RS232 and connect to this over it. The reason is that the old CRTC chip I was playing with had a maximum system clock speed of 2MHz. Blue April normally runs at 8Mhz, and I think can probably do more. Limiting the system clock to 2Mhz in order to get video out of an old chip seemed kind of silly at that point. I would probably get better performance leaving the clock up, bit banging the video, and letting her do other stuff during the blanking periods. This is also not very appealing, so I thought, well, why not just have a dedicated video coprocessor? Can have a second 6502 that does all the video stuff, runs at whatever clock the old CRTC chip likes, and is just basically an old-school terminal. THEN I thought, if I'm going to go that far, I might as well ditch the CRTC and generate the timings myself. I'll learn more, and can do VGA instead of composite.

Tidied up a bit (don't need all those trouble LEDs now)! Also, switched to an M27C256 EPROM. I have a few of them laying around, and I've been wanting to do a project with them. Even though the Atmel EEPROM I used in the first build seemed to be doing fine with it's 150ns rating, my EPROMs are rated at 70ns.

Very good goals. When you find a way to (quickly) use a character ROM, let me know! I am still puzzled as to how I could get an EEPROM or some such to run fast enough to be my character ROM.

Looks good! I'm happy to see you progress on this!

Chad

Just a brief update and a reply to Chad!

I did some resistor math this afternoon, made a little resistor network, and got my little display to emit a passable amber! This means my HBLANK and VBLANK signals are good, because they are gating the RGB output signal.
Then, even though I said I'm not interested in color, I got rid of the resistor network, put in some variable resistors, and had fun dialing in some different colors! I guess I'm interested in having exactly one color!
I haven't tried it yet, but I don't think it should be a problem. The character clock for this project will be approximately πMHz (25.175 pixel clock / . In theory, once every character clock the ROM will spit out 8 bits (one line) of character data, which is absorbed by a 165 PISO shift register, which in turn will squirt pixels to the screen at the pixel clock rate. I'm more worried about the timing of the shift register. The 165 has an asynchronous parallel load, and must hold all 8 bits to shift them out. In other words, I'll have to shift out the last bit then shift in the next byte before it's time to shift out the first bit of the next byte. That's a pretty small target!

I put pots on my last monochrome build as well. It is neat to change to whatever color you want at the time.

As far as the shift register, I use a '166 instead of a '165. But they look similar. As far as I can tell, you drive /PE low, and THEN you rise the CLK line to actually parallel load. Sync loading, not async.

OH I see, yes, the '165 is async loading, but the '166 is sync loading. I would recommend the '166 instead.

Glad things are working out so quickly!

Chad

Another quick update: not too many improvements this evening, but I did add a latch and a 74HC08 to the HBLANK / VBLANK signals, so I have an actual output stage instead of a bunch of random flying wires! Chad, you were absolutely right about the synchronous shift register; I have some `166s on order from Digikey. I get weird results with the `165. The load timing is tooo fussy.

For testing purposes, I just connected the output stage to the `163 I'm using as a prescaler. It all worked as expected. It's a little hard to capture these in photographs, but I think this might be the most "useful" one:
Each "bar" is 8 pixels wide, and there are 40 "on" bars and 40 "off" bars, so that is basically a template for 80 column text.

Cool! Would like to see your test of that Character ROM with that setup. Even random garbage or repeating patterns would be a good sign if it's *really* going to work (I'm super scared so I'll let you try first!).

I found 80 columns is very nice to use. I have that on most of my builds. On my next one I'm considering only a 40-column mode to save chips and logic and stuff.

How are you going to interface the screen RAM (be it characters or bitmap) with your CPU RAM? You said Blue April is running at 8 MHz, which is not a direct division of the 25.175 MHz. You mentioned a serial connection, so would you use a ACIA or bit bang from a VIA?

Glad you are making progress!

Chad

Well, the "character ROM" is still a bit-map file on my Mac, sooooo... I did plug in a random ROM I had laying around that I happened to know had some 6502 machine code on it, hoping to get some random junk. I did not get any random junk, thanks to the many errors between the ROM and the screen. I have slowly been working my way back up the chain, fixing things as I go. I've almost got back to the ROM! Getting a successful output from any memory means the parallel / serial conversion must be working, and - it isn't. Yet!
I think I would like to try the ACIA. I don't have one, and it seems like a useful chip to get to know. Garth has an RS232 primer that I haven't read yet, but looks comprehensive!