[Coco] Re: Coco on a SVGA monitor using the Xrgb-2 Plus

[James Dessart]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 jdaggett at gate.net wrote:

> To really get the price down to the $50 range will have to have above 50 or so 
> committed orders. IF you include a wall wart with the package, I can't see much less 
> than $75 for a production run of less that 50. More if less than 25. 

Which is why it would probably be best in a low-gate-count FPGA, using a
simple A/D conversion using resistors and 4 pins for each component of the
CoCo's signal. If you can fit an SVGA core in, and scan doubling logic,
you could potentially have an under $50 device. Since we have a very
specific need, we don't need general purpose chips, since in this case
they cost more.

I'm not a hardware engineer, so take my ideas with a grain of salt, but I
imagine you could probably fit all of that into a smallish FPGA, along
with some SRAM for the framebuffer. The same chip design could have small
modifications to make a CoCo video expansion board as well, with OS-9
drivers (since it'd probably be hard to modify RS-DOS to use VGA
resolutions.

James