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This channel is so absurdly underrated. Great content, THANK YOU!

I'm not only amazed by your skill-set and the awesomeness of this project, but also of how humble and polite you are. Such a rare combo these days! These and the previous part's demos are unbelievable!

Two dimensional palette cycling. Very nice! It's a lot of fun to watch someone who has an interest in hardware as well as software (demo effects at that). It probably seems obvious that if you are going to build your own hardware you are going to write your own software, but quite a few people don't make it that far or have the skills themselves I'd say.

Very impressive! When I thought about multiple palettes earlier I managed not to think of fade effects somehow, one of those 'obvious in hindsight' things :)

While I don't fully understand all the technical aspects of all this I find it absolutely amazing that you're creating all this from scratch. And your explanations are easy to understand. Wonderful videos!

James, thanks for sharing the problems you run into. It makes the whole process more interesting. Also I could watch the LEDs on your computer flash for hours. They have a wonderful visual quality to them as they show what is going on at each level. It's a great visual design. Congrats on the patreon threshold. I plan to join myself, soon.

I've had a busy two weeks and it's been a treat to see a new video of the series on the way back. And one of the most visual ones. I hope you are as proud of the results as you deserve to be. For me it's amazing to see such visual effects on hardware like this. Thanks as always for the great content.

Fabulous stuff. Can't wait til we get to the full-on demoscene multiscroller stuff with sick late 80s-early 90s acid techno :)

I was missing these videos, they are so cool. Thank you James

These videos are one of best in UKposts to look at.

Love it. Such a cool effect with the shaded cylinder 😍

I love this stuff! I appreciate you taking the time to demonstrate this stuff, so thank you!

Lovely to see you building up the layers of functionality.

Great to see the project progress (I'm always in awe). Really enjoyed the image fade, it helps bring the graphics to life - I can see the potential already :)

Thank you so much for this awesome series. I learned a lot and plan on rewatching many times to increase my understanding. I am subscribed and looking forward to more content from you.

Kewl stuffz! Very timely, I just binged all your other videos, left me hungry for more :-) Amazed I hadn't discovered you long ago. You are Eater++ Level! :-)

Excellent, James! Bloody awesome!

I know that I and others mentioned multiple pages of palettes in the comments previously, but I have to say that I am gobsmacked with what you were able to do with it. Obviously your knowledge of coding for graphics and animation is way way above anything that I would have dreamt up. Well done! And catching that error in the timing generator and the fix for it was pretty cool too - a testament to the flexibility of your design methodology.

Always exciting to see how functionality grows.

Yeah, exactly like that. I hadn't expect my random thought on the last video would turn out to be exactly right.

Holy shit, this is so cool. I cannot even believe how knowledgeable and humble you are. As an EE student, I can't imagine all the hard work that went into this. Fantastic job, truly inspirational.

This is really impressive progress and I can't wait to see a game making full use of the new hardware! Now that single-cycle palette changes are possible I guess you can create (32*256) colour images, though limited to only changing palette every X pixels horizontally with some carefully timed code. I've been working on something similar on some retro ZX Spectrum code (similar to the Nirvana engine). I think some of the old Sega megadrive games used palette changes on scanlines for things like water effects if I remember rightly. So that everything was tinged blue under the water level etc. Can't wait to see what you come up with!

Enjoyed the video, Thanks for sharing...

Spectacular results. I started programming in 1982 so I've always been a fan of creating visual effects by combining simpler code to create them. Probably why programming for the Atari 8-bit computers was so much fun for me: Very nice display effects could be created by simply changing the display list used by the ANTIC chip. Nice work getting that fade/shadow effect done in hardware. Allows for significantly more complex code to run in a game engine.

Totally fascinating.

Absolutely Brilliant ! Sounds like it will be a spririted demo at some point ;) Ok, less cryptic: I've the feeling at some point we will have sprites ;)

Sheer wizardry, if you ask me. Software is complicated enough to design/figure out and debug. TO add hardware to the mix looks mor elike witchcraft, except it isn't. Never boring to watch this, even if some of it is cryptic. Very, very satisfying.

This reminds me of some classic Jon Burton/Traveller's Tales tricks on the MegaDrive / Super Famicom / Amiga, right down to the authentic English accent! (Minus the spectacular hardware on the bench, though. ;-) )

That thing does better fractal clouds than the laptop I had years ago :D I love it! I'm interested how you're gonna expand this in the future. Have you considered building a sort of "back plane" PCB with address and data lines broken out to card edge connectors that boards can slot into? I'd love to see something like that :D Maybe in a custom enclosure with guide rails that custom standardised cards can slide into, complete with edge lit LEDs

And you found a use for that fourth bit! I notice a bit of unshaded lines at the very extremes of the cylinder travel.

Fantastic.

of course changing the pallet between scan lines is how the megadrive did the under water sections in sonic. There was a separate under water palette for the level so the could change the water level to be what ever they wanted dynamically without redrawing sprites or tiles. (actually they did add sprites to the waters surface to simulate foam)

Amazing build. I like ability to switch pallets very quickly. There is a small issue with the RAMDAC and VGA driving. Lack of gamma / sRGB. You can see this on the intensity demo, where the bright colors do not fade at the same rate as darker colors. Not sure if this actually need to be applied to electric signal, or just the pallet entries need to be made non-linear to properly use sRGB.

Thanks

YAY VIDEO

Having just binged the VGA from Scratch series in a few days and having it all in my head, I managed to figure out what your bug was before you did in this video! That was fun. Fantastic demos here! Playlist maintenance note: this video's not in the VGA playlist yet. And, another playlist thought-the hundred videos of the main CPU playlist is a bit intimidating! Do you think there are any contained sub-playlists that would make sense there, to help ease people into it? Or is it not self-contained enough like the later playlists?

8:48 I enjoyed "rægester data"

Awesome work mate - as usual! Maybe consider not using red->green for showing texture examples in the future (though I know you are limited) - I'm not colour blind, but I think 1 in 5 males are, and red and green are the killers!!!!

Now create a time machine, bring this back to 1980 and allow game developers go nuts on this. I would love to see what kind of great games would come out of this.

Would be neat if the spare memory could do a screen sized lookup texture over the display. You could do 'free' frosted glass/water caustics/heat shimmer with the tile graphics. Maybe even the feedback and offset effects that muic app were doing in the 2000's

This is really awesome! If only there was a faster way to copy data from ram or rom to the palette. I know that some old consoles did it with a special purpose DMA controller. DMA is still even used today in modern processors.

NICE.

What would be a good comparison for the capabilites and performance of this hardware? Somewhere around GBC? I'd love to see a game running on this. Also, thank you very much for the interesting video. This project is amazing!

Outstanding! I notice that your schematic symbols are simple outlines of each physical chip, rather than symbols of functional gates. I guess for someone used to breadboarding this is fairly natural, but with complex logic, a symbol based schematic is far easier to read. Does EasyEDA support gate symbol schematics like other CAD packages do?

Looking great James. Is it time to move it to an FPGA yet? :)

Really good work.... perhaps you should exchange that ROM socket with a ZIF socket to make it easier?

James, could you do a video on/point me to how you've got C compilers working?

Hi James, superb series, I gained an interest by originally following Ben Eaters series, I built and modified his breadboard computer. I'm now currently part way through building the pipeline cpu from your board schematics on EasyAda, I would lik to get a copy of your assembler and coding for the Roms. Is this posible? thanks

So you basically have 32 palettes of 255 colors each. That seems unheard of for an 8-bit micro computer, but surprisingly in spirit. The technology of the time was limited by what the developers could get their hands on, so they made sure to use everything of what ended up in the system. You simply used what was available for the palette RAM, and then applied "waste not; want not." How much color depth was in the original parrot image? If it originally used more than 256 colors, could you have it so that it uses a different palette every few lines to display even more colors on screen at once? Alternatively, what about sprites? Sprites often used separate palettes from tiles, so the larger palette sélection could let some be reserved for sprites rather than tiles. That said, they might need to be accessed stimulant with the tile palettes like why you used separate RAMs for each color channel. If you end up with another 32 palettes for the sprites, that would just be even more insane.

Could you hide the visual noise of preloading the palette data, by loading them only during the vertical blank? After loading the first one of course, and displaying a static image with it.

You’ve mentioned a simulator a couple of times now, but I don’t remember a video talking about it. Did I miss a video somewhere?

I think additional palette bits could be connected to address lines so more colors image can be achieved.

Why can't IBM PC VGA have horizontal blank interrupts to play with ☹ *looks at **12:51* 😮

The into the screen chase in mickey mania was done using palette swaps

How about to make the resolution of the video 720 to better fit all the power of wide TV.

with this new hardware you could display even more colors on the screen by cycling through different pallets per each line. In theory you could do 8,192 colors at once.

Does your simulator include sound emulation?

How often do you need new EEPROMs?

I hope that someday this VGA system is converted into a final VGA Graphics card.

Read about NBA Jam's use of palettes: 512 colors, 16 bits of color, per sprite.

do you have the files for the simulator, i dont have the money to make my own

Can you remind us what clock rate you are running at currently?

Good work man, thanks Can you explain an intel arc a380? it's a bit of a mysterious gpu It's harware seems to be ok but its not performing well, and this is too weird

Goal achieved: 100K/(2 * pi) subs? :-)

Thumbs up if you want the resolution of the video 720 to better fit all the power of wide TV.