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HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin

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Re: HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin

#41

Post by mmastrac »

mikecoles wrote: post #26
haunter wrote: post #11

Are there any recommended made to oder PCB services if you just want a card? Googling around seems to be a lot of options all over the world but maybe some HNers have experience with some of them.

JLCPCB has worked for me. There are others, but I haven't had the need to look elsewhere. OSHPark is another I recall. https://jlcpcb.com/ https://oshpark.com/

JLCPCB is great as long as your components don't get too small. They made a few boards for me with a tiny component that just didn't work. I think they vastly overestimate their minimum trace size.

Re: HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin

#44

Post by noobermin »

So, this is probably a super nimby moment, but the growing excitement around "retrocomputing" (really just old machines) means a lot of hardware is becoming super expensive. Like good luck finding an IDE harddrive under 500 MB that works, people are pulling them out of working old machines, putting them on ebay for 100s to even 1000 usd, then shipping them in after thought packaging that has them fall apart on their way there. This hobby is fast becoming a rich man's game for speculators and huskers.

It's a tragedy really. I feel like efforts like OP are great because they pull pressure off the literally limited stock thereby making the speculators go elsewhere (segasaturn games and the like mostly).

Re: HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin

#46

Post by dfxm12 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #29

> The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. Some CGA ran over composite, and there's plenty of modern small TVs with a composite input. It's perfectly fine to use a TV as a computer monitor. (I do!) > This analog-to-digital conversion will also l…

FWIW, the lifetime of a CRT display is generally less than the lifetime of the rest of the PC. I don't think it's much trouble to install a card on a PC that didn't happen to have composite out, or to want something better than composite on a modern LCD display. You don't have to get it. It's not for you. That's OK.

Re: HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin

#47

Post by gwbas1c »

treve wrote: post #32
gwbas1c wrote: post #29

> The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. Some CGA ran over composite, and there's plenty of modern small TVs with a composite input. It's perfectly fine to use a TV as a computer monitor. (I do!) > This analog-to-digital conversion will also l…

Count me in as someone who likes vintage hardware but modern displays. In my case it's old game consoles. The drop in video quality with composite is real. This has less to do with the resolution, but more with the fact that hardware that upscales this to an HD or 4K panel needs to make an educated guess where pixels start and end, and gets it wrong. It looks quite ugly practically and switching to something with cri…

> The drop in video quality with composite is real.

Remember, this is CGA. Some games specifically take advantage of composite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

Likewise, remember that the monitor connector is digital. If you build an HDMI (or DVI, DisplayPort, whatever) converter, you're starting with a digital signal, not an analog one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Specifi...

Re: HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin

#48

Post by Teknoman117 »

zare_st wrote: post #37

I have a couple of vintage computers. One is my original first computer. While there is a cheap expansion that would allow me to hook up any VGA screen on it, the part of the experience is the screen. I've been hooked on to retro computing a while, and I flatted out somewhat. It all depends on what you want to do. If you want to play games or run software I suggest you take a good deep look at the emulators. I had a…

My main trouble with the emulators/virtual machines is that late-90s and early-00s Windows/DirectX games are a huge dead spot.

There are a ton of titles from this era that just don't work on current Windows, even with dgVoodoo. I just want to be able to comfortably get rid of this Win98 SE / WinXP dual boot box I have lying around...

Re: HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin

#49

Post by PaulHoule »

The retrocomputing community has struggled with making display controllers because it's not so practical to make one with 74xx/54xx parts (which have just a few gates on a chip) I saw an ad for once circa 1978 in Byte Magazine which was a circuit board about as big as an IBM PC expansion card where both sides of the board were packed with chips. Something like that costs about the same today as it did in 1978.

Home computers/game consoles of the time mainly had ASIC display controllers but projects like

https://www.commanderx16.com/

don't really have the volume to justify making an ASIC so they wind up using FPGA (like this card) or microcontrollers to function as display controllers. Note the super low-end

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80

did not have a video ASIC but instead tricked the microprocessor into functioning as a video controller which meant that it could only show video when it was done thinking, see

https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/cvcb1.pdf

though that technique can be used today to turn a (secondary) microprocessor for a display controller.

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