"Bill Kendrick" <
bi...@newbreedsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:4fa0c10a$0$16199$742e...@news.sonic.net...
There's just so many ways to separate me from my money!<grin>
http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/545516201/Worldwide_smallest_smart_android_tv_box.html
The specs on that one match my desktop except for hard drive. My laptop has
it beat.
It's a confusing time and I am easily confused. I've heard VGA is at the end
of its product life. I've heard real modems are selling for ~$300 because
they are still used by POS for credit cards and electric transfers: No one
trusts the internet or wireless.
I don't think you can buy anything but a SATA hard drive and IDE controllers
are going the way of the dodo. Remember when there was something called a
Sound Blaster?
This type of info used to be good news for someone like me, living off the
sharp edge of technology, but now people are so hard up they are stealing
stuff just for recycling. I may pick up a few more LCD VGA monitors just for
fool'in.
I've been really dissatisfied with stock Atari video for a while. I've had
an insight that may be cheap and work. There's a couple of techniques people
have used for bank switching carts and some devices like the Covox. One is
to latch the address lines and the other is to set up a single latch like a
74LS374 in the memory map. There's shift registers like the 74LS165 that
were used in early video for things like the Timex Sinclair and even Bob
Woolley's 80 column mod. What I was thinking was the same signals that latch
cart banking could be used to latch data into a 74LS165 except instead of
doing it under processor control or via a separate video chip like a 6845 I
should be able to get the signals from ANTIC. Done this way everything will
be sync'd with the existing display and overlap w/o flicker. Antic will just
go through its reading 40 bytes per scan line which will load the shift
register with it's own RAM, Simple form would just be a the shift register
and an 8k RAM with enough glue logic to make it work. Shouldn't cost more
the $5 in parts.
Of course you could do something fancy, like use a 16 bit wide RAM and two 8
bit shift registers with a fast dot clock to get 640x200 but that would add
so much complexity I doubt if 1 in 1000 people could build it. Heck, I
couldn't build it. I was happy with the ST 320X200 in 16 colors for games. I
think I could be happy with and 8bit that throws 16k<8k system + 8k RAM> of
display up.
Rick