Quinn Dunki's Veronica 6502

Continuing the discussion from Yet another TMS9900 computer:

As I mentioned in @bdk6’s thread, Quinn Dunki has made a number of comments on 8-bit machine video production in her series on her Veronica 6502-based homebrew computer. The original Veronica used an Atmel microcontroller as a “GPU” (with additional updates after that article) to tackle this problem. In recent months she’s been updating it to use a TMS9918A replacement, the F18A, which is currently not in production.

The quote I mentioned in the other article (from here) was:

What I failed to appreciate is that any given 1980s computer was not a CPU and some RAM hanging off a bus. It was a crazy mad scientist method of generating video based on the fever dream of a hardware engineer who had spent a little too much time watching The Last Starfighter, and maybe not quite enough time reading reference circuits for the parts in her drawers. Every 1980s computer was an experiment in a new way to generate graphics, and everything else (CPU, RAM, etc) was an accessory to that effort. This is crucial to understand, and it’s something that nobody in the home-brew computer world ever seems to talk about.

(Emphasis in the original.)

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I would say that philosophy went back at least to the Apple ][. Woz wanted to play breakout and built a graphics system, with a computer attached, to make that happen.

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