Re: This week's screwy idea From: John/Lori Reply to: henk@diespammerdiedoitnow.com Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 11:32:05 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com - Discussions start here! References: <741a8g$403@chronicle.concentric.net> I'm in to screwy ideas Are you talking about a replacement (mother?)board? Are you expecting it to be compatible? So for example do you expect the 6502 display controller to look like the VIC? If so how compatible? Is it good enough if it gets the info in the display buffer to the screen, or does it have to run all those tricky mid-line mode switched demos? Why a 6502? Might, say, a PIC do better? I have had similar thoughts (about a display controller, at least) I think a fairly compatible system might be contrived - except for sprites. Perhaps you could have one processor (or maybe some standard display chip) to just run the display and one that handled the sprites and could kibitz when it thought it needed to. But I think you'ld have to give up some of those fancy demo gfx. (you might pick up others but it wouldn't be totally backwards compatible) Another possibility might be FPGAs or PLDs of some sort. My pet fantasy is a VIC compatible display controller with added capabilities implimented in an FPGA. But perhaps you could do something simpler. A processor as diplay controller trading memory for speed. Maybe doing mode switches by paging in different routines on the fly, with really time-critical functions implimented in a (hopefully) relatively simple PLD. and spread every thing out (in parallel) in memory as far as possible.