I genuinely love the time we live in. All this with a few dollars in hardware, an infinite resource of info readily available, and even the ability to design and get your own custom circuit boards made for the price of a Starbucks coffee and sent directly to your door in a matter of days. Our only constraint is a choice of ignorance. Love it!

Ben Eater talked about this for hours, for anyone who wants to spend a day on this topic

Gotta admit, never would've thought that a microcontroller like the pico could be powerful enough to play a game, render it, and drive an output image. Absolutely mind blown.

This is the first decent explanation of VGA I have seen. Thank you. Yes, I would be interested in SD card and audio as well.

What I find amazing is how technology that seemed way beyond my understanding eventually becomes easy and obvious when explained well.

Great explanation of VGA for the pico. Some of you may find the PicoMiteVGA implementation interesting....basic on a pico with vga support...and the graphics commands needed. I have not messed with the VGA version yet but the regular PicoMite seems to work well. The fellow who did the MaxiMite boards brought Basic over to the pico. So now we can have an 80's micro in the form of a pico microcontroller board.

Great video, Gary and great topic. You have my vote for more obscure, esoteric things you can do with the Pico.

Thanks Gary for the explanation of how the VGA can be produced. The video you shared was truly mindblowing. I've seen microcontrollers used to play snake or other simple games, but it is truly mindblowing that a microcontroller can emulate a PC to play a (relatively) sophisticated 3D graphics game. Wow!

Very interesting explanation of VGA, well worth making and watching.

Ohhh! I get it now! Thank you for your excellent explanation of how a VGA signal and interface really works.

Very good explanation on VGA signal, and creating VGA from PICO. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Great explanatory video. Reminded me of the Atari 2600. This is similar to how the Atari 2600 has to be coded but at much lower resolution because the 6502 doesn't have enough grunt in it and each instruction takes at least two clock cycles, IIRC. But here the PIO takes up much of the grunt work that has to be done in software on the 2600. There is no buffer of any kind on that thing and because virtually all its time is taken up drawing the screen, most of the extra code has to be performed in the VBLANK area (what you call the Front Porch at the top of the screen).

Informative tutorial, thank you.

Thank you Gary.

Very well explained sir!

The RP2040 and its PIO are fantastic. Half-step between microcontrollers and FPGAs. Like VIDOR.

Very good Gary but the PicoMiteVGA is a more complete implementation and already avaialble. Uses the 2nd ARM CPU and one of the PIOs to generate VGA without impacting the very fast MMBasic running on the other CPU. High level graphic commands and sprites, file system via both SD card and onboard Flash. Some very clever people have developed the 'Mite' over the past 12 years or so (previously on the PIC32) and it's really impressive. They are busy working on a Picomite-based (6-8 channel) Logic Analyser at the moment - it uses PIO DMA transfers (controlled by MMB) to achieve the speed. Just built a PicomiteVGA 'home computer' for my Grandson's birthday - software a free download, hardware just a Pico and a few components. Very inexpensive and much easier to do for us programming Dummies! 🙂

THIS IS JUST CRAZY SMART!!!! I DONT HAVE ANNYTHING TO SAY!!! Simple and genius!!!!

wow ....just wow....i feel like i am learning the esoterica of a secret religion....super awesome content. Thanks for sharing your knowledge...

I think technically the port is called D-sub? Great video!

It's interesting if you look at the Espressif ESP32 variants how many of them have co-processors that aren't well known. For example ESP32-S3 has two LX7 ARM main processors and two ULP coprocessors, one based on RISC-V instruction set architecture (ULP-RISC-V) and the other on finite state machine (ULP-FSM). The clock of the coprocessors is the internal fast RC oscillator. C3 and C2 look to be missing out on these. While the coprocessor speeds appear at first glance to be very constrained by the RTC clock speed, don't forget that the ESP32 units contain DMA. While a micro like the C3 needs highly structured multitasking to run real time tasks in addition to something like VGA (And doesn't have that many pins anyway), most of the other ESP32 variants do have the capacity. Many of the pheripherals support DMA which substantially offloads urgent tasks when used. If the ULP can be switched to run at a higher clock speed, there's a lot more can be done with many of the Espressif chips. And they have built in Wireless. That's the main thing putting me off doing much with the RP2040 dev boards. On the flip side of that, I developed a PCB years ago using an OSD chip. Around the time I started populating the board, I found the OSD chip was going obsolete, so it's great to see projects like the VGA hat and the HDMI hat for the RP2040. I would think that typical sorts of tasks the ULP would be well suited for would be things like remote control IR code bit banging, reading and writing other custom bit banged protocols. Not sure how much connectivity the low power RISC-v sub core has on the S3 to the main pheripherals? Of course there's also the possibility that the processors are not fully available, for example they may get priority tasks from the 2.4G subsystem, I don't know if that stuff is in embedded code or if it's implemented in an FPGA realised as a subset ASIC block on chip.

I kind of want to build a custom RP2040 dongle that just plugs into USB and VGA to output something like this. That's be so cool!

Imagine going back in the 1980s with Pico running Pac-Man and show the designers with their multi PCB boards down to the size of a cigarette lighter. lol

Love this series on embedded programming. Would love a USB driven GPIO board I can plug directly into my PC and not need a Pi or Arduino!

8:23 I think the diagram is wrong, it connects the 2k ohm resistor for blue to ground instead of GP13 (17), and the 1K ohm resistor for GREEN to GND. I believe this was caused by just copying the connection-pattern from RED and not checking the ground-pins

If nothing else, it's great for teaching people how graphics adapters work at the most basic level.

I did this too!

Pico DVI is also a thing (and works over HDMI)

Digital to audio. Bada bing bada boom

I guess you could write a MicroPython extension in C, but the interpreter will use up some of that precious memory!

A simple doubling of resistor value between bit positions does not give a linear output. Consider the 500 and 1000 values. If only the GPIO with the 500 resistor is high the voltage across the 75 ohm in the display is proportional to 75/(500+75) = 0.1304 When only the 1000 ohm one is energised the voltage across the 75 is proportional to 75(1000+75) = 0.0.0698. Clearly the first of those is less than twice the second. For the 8K resistor it is 75(8000+75) = 0.009288. The ratio between the outputs from the 500 and 8000 is only 14.043 instead of the ideal 16.

Is it possible to use 1 pin with 1 resistor pwm to replace the 5 pins with resistors

What if I need VGA input? I have a 16x16 neopixel grid here.

Does anyone know what the component (47) that they placed in hsync and vsync is?

Why is the 2k resistor in the blue section in your diagram connect to ground and not to GP13?

Is the same doable with ESP32? It's similar in performance and RAM (more RAM, I think - 320K), but I don't know if it has hardware DMA which seems crucial.

This will surely able to run cyberpunk 🎉🎉

There's errors in your diagram at 8:17. Your resistor ladders some resistors connected to ground and the GPIO is left open.

Why can my vga make 1080p if it is so much smaller in the video?

The E12 values might be 470, 1000, 2200, 3900 and 8100. That should be closer enough.

-HDMI- DVI is actually possible on the RPi Pico.

240p possible?

My 386DX-40 PC with 4 MB of RAM cannot really run DOOM - it's too slow (no FPU). And the Pico with 320K can? The CPU is faster for sure, but what about RAM? DOOM requires 4MB at the minimum.

would be cool if someone could come up with some sort graphics card based on the pico with an ttl interface so that ppl could use it on their homebrew computers. maybe even sprites might be possible.. just dreaming..

I just sold my 10 years old AOC monitor(1920x1080) for ¥90($13), last week. 😭. How I wish that I had seen this video earlier.

I think the Pico will be 70% busy and full with VGA. You have to program really fast and efficiently to squeeze everything in there. Therefore everything in C++ and not in python. Each higher Lib will again need space and CPU time. The 8 bit computers of the 80's had their own IC that took care of the video and not the CPU.

*GARY!!!* *Good Evening Professor!* *Good Evening Fellow Classmates!* Stay Safe Out There Everyone!

A gun? Try three guns - one for each of the colours red, green and blue!

It doesn't have enough memory for a 480p frame buffer but it can run Doom? That is extremely hard to believe.

The schematic is wrong. You connect two pins to GND....

Boku no pico 🤠

> "But can it run Crysis?"

of course its doom

16:06 yes yes no problem its not 16bit its 5bit haha

A little board consuming hours and hours of programmer's time.

Vega is shit. Iam from europe and we have rgb in composit and universal euroconnector 😊

Yes, lets not use an SoC with a built-in framebuffer and digital video interface, and instead produce a 5-bit-per-channel analog legacy format for which display devices get increasingly rare by the day by bitbanging and having CPU utilization close to 100% all the time. Also, the severe shortages of all Raspberry Pi products means that you probably should avoid them altogether, at least if you have the option.

what good is this video with nothing to how we can do this just you thumb down