Guest post by From the Byte Cellar:
What inspired me to pull the Model 4 down off the shelf were a number of tweets from telnet BBS pals showing the system being put to great use logged into various systems across the web. Some of the screenshots showed the machine rendering ANSI “graphics” onscreen and I looked into it. As I suspected, the stock Model 4 is not capable of taking on a custom character set such as is needed by ANSI emulation, and I discovered the system had been equipped with a graphics board and the ANSI-supporting terminal program, ANSITerm, was rendering “text” to a graphics display; the character set was basically a software font.
And I just had to go there.
Did anyone else design and make their own graphic card for their 8-bit computer?
Originally I made a S-100 adapter for my Commodore 2001 computer, but later I changed the 8K card to give me a 320 by 200 video card.
I always wondered if others did the same type of thing for their computers since aside from the Dazzler I never saw anything in any of the computer magazines.
That is so freaking awesome, Earl.
Not really, it was real hack job. Instead of 2-to-1 multipliers when reading or writing memory I used 74193 counters and wrote the address directly to the binary counters instead.
Result, the video would scramble with every single read or write from my software until vertical refresh took place.
Worthless for animation, but the video was stable once the writes were finished so I could view graphic results.
Knowing what I do today, I would make the video card very different.
If hindsight were foresight we’d all be geniuses.
I still think it’s awesome.