Dazzler?
Posted:
December 3rd, 2013, 2:50 pmby toml_12953
The Dazzler was a very popular peripheral back in the day. It gave the Altair a way to display color graphics. Any chance of getting it incorporated into the Clone?
Re: Dazzler?
Posted:
December 4th, 2013, 6:59 pmby AltairClone
No, the Clone does not have an I/O interface with enough bandwidth to interface to a video board.
Mike
Re: Dazzler?
Posted:
December 5th, 2013, 10:48 pmby tolerpro
To me, the Processor Technology VDM-1 display card is a hot issue. I have a bunch of code written for that device and would love to be able to emulate it. I have the beginnings of an FPGA-based emulation design rumbling around in my head. To be successful, it would need to look to the Altair as a 1K block of RAM and to the outside world as a VGA monitor port but generate a reasonable facsimile of the VDM-1 display on a standard PC monitor.
Looking at the Clone board, it's difficult to ascertain what's going on without a schematic but, it might be possible to use the 88-ACR port to send a serial command string to such a device to emulate memory read/write access. As Mike stated, however, the available bandwidth may not permit a full-speed emulation. Still, it would be a blast to be able to do it!