[Coco] A Silly MC6847 to HDMI Conversion Idea

[Dave Philipsen]

I think that's a cool idea. Not silly at all.  I have often dreamt of the same thing as well as a GIME plug-in that would do the same for the CoCo 3.  There are all kinds of possibilities here. You could have an option for doubling the scan lines for a crisper text mode look, creating a higher resolution font that is still 32x16 but smoother, lower-case option, fix some of the undocumented SG modes, etc.

Dave Philipsen

> On Aug 4, 2016, at 7:07 PM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
> 
> Last night I had a silly idea for making an FPGA-based module that would plug into the socket in place of an MC6847 or MC6847T1, emulating the original VDG while also generating clean HDMI output for connection to modern displays. It wouldn't necessarily add any new graphics modes, but it would allow very crisp HDMI output with proper emulation of the NTSC color aliasing effects.
> 
> While I doubt that this idea is practical enough to actually bring it to reality (e.g., I would anticipate a total worldwide market for about one of these devices, counting myself), I do wonder whether anybody else has played with any sort of drop-in MC6847 replacements to add functionality to the CoCo 1/2 or any other vintage systems that used the MC6847.
> 
> -- 
> Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
> http://www.nf6x.net/
> 
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