over the years we’ve seen a number of hackers generate VGA with 74xx logic chips, but they’ve generally not been the most practical of builds. often put together as part of a competition or purely for the challenge, these circuits are usually implemented in a mass of jumper wires and often take up multiple breadboards. Not exactly something you can toss in a drawer when you’re done with it.
But the Vectron VGA Plus, created by prolific hacker [Nick Bild], manages to improve on things considerably. designed specifically to be smaller and simpler than its predecessors, the custom PCB contains far fewer chips than we’re used to seeing for this kind of thing. At the same time it provides a handy header row along the bottom that allows the user to connect whatever they’re working on, from microcontrollers to retro computers.
When your breadboard looks like this, it’s time for a PCB.
It looks like the PCB could still be shrunk down considerably if you’re really looking to maximize desk space, but we imagine for his purposes, [Nick] felt this was more than compact enough. especially when you look at what the same circuit looked like during the breadboard phase. Yikes.
So, what did it take to simplify this 640 x 480 VGA interface? The short answer is adding more RAM. wherever possible, dedicated hardware was replaced with software operations that could be performed by the externally connected device. [Nick] has provided some sample code for the Arduino that lets the microcontroller push data into the board’s memory and take control.
We can trace the origins of this project back a few years, to when [Nick] was working on adding an LCD to his homebrew 6502 computer. A few months later he put together the earlier version of this board, the Vectron VGA, before switching gears and handing VGA generation duty over to a FPGA. We’re excited to see the next evolution of this project, and given the track record of this particular hacker, we shouldn’t have to wait long before it hits our inbox.