Re: Working Commodore LCD emulator & specification is available now

From: Daniel O'Shea <dan_at_ozramp.net.au>
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2015 18:32:24 +1100
Message-ID: <550D1E88.5090105@ozramp.net.au>
Finally got around to exploring the idea of getting a CLCD emulator 
displaying on a real-life 480x128 LCD screen! I had acquired the LCD a 
while back, but haven't found the 'spare' time to play until now...

The display uses an Epson S1D13700 controller, which has onboard 
character RAM with space for 256 characters - so I was able to extract 
the characters from the emulator's 'lcd_char_rom' and then rearrange the 
bytes into the format expected by the Epson controller, and upload them 
into its character RAM.

I adapted the source for the MESS CLCD emulator so that it sends 1280 
bytes per frame (80 characters per row, times 16 rows = 1280) out of my 
PC over USB to a plain old Arduino which then passes the values onto the 
LCD, and it works great!

http://postimg.org/image/ewid0aza9/
http://postimg.org/image/9cthm1a29/

The next step would either be getting the emulator to run directly on 
the microcontroller, or trying to add in some of the original ICs... but 
I've had fun so far!

On 22/01/14 19:33, Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 06:35:13AM +0000, Baltissen, GJPAA (Ruud) wrote:
>> Hallo Daniel,
>>
>>
>>> ... to get the emulator running on something like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino
>>> interfaced to a real 480x128 LCD! :-)
>>
>> Then what about creating the real machine?
>> - I don't know about the availability of the 65C102 but that can be replaced by the 65C02.
>> - the 65C22 and ACIA are available.
>> - there is enough info about how the MMU should behave, so shouldn't be a problem either.
>
> This was my idea too :) 65C02 can be safely used, AFAIK 65C102 and 65C02 are
> compatible from the software side.  What I thought is to use a 65816 CPU
> instead.  CLCD ROMs seem not use bit ops of 'C02 which are not on 65816
> (SMB/RMB?  and like).  But then you would have a "16 bit native mode"
> (probably with the ability to set the clock to higher frequency as well) of
> your "CLCD" capable of addressing more memory etc, but still being
> compatible with CLCD.  Maybe the only headache is to create the LCD
> controller and MMU, I guess some kind of CPLD or FPGA would be needed, but I
> am really not the right person about those PLD topics anyway.  If the
> machine has some eg SPI interface built-in it can be even used for "serious
> work" eg programming AVRs, using it as a serial terminal and so on.
> Especially if it's packages like a real CLCD so it's easily portable and has
> batteries.  Much better feeling than a PC notebook :) :)
>
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Received on 2015-03-21 08:00:05

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