Monotron: Making a 80s style computer with a $20 dev kit
summary
Claims a working retro computer built in Rust on cheap hardware: 80 MHz Cortex-M dev board (Stellaris launchpad, 256K flash/32K RAM) drives VGA by abusing SPI and timers, using an SPI FIFO driven 20MHz pixel clock to output 400×600 double-width pixels as a character display. Software composes an ~character grid ~48×36 with 8×16 glyphs, uses lookup tables for color (costing ~64KB flash), needs tiny inline assembly, and largely works though corners and full RGB remain imperfect.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:36Why Monotron
- 4:19Goals
- 5:20First platform
- 6:03The board
- 7:33The chip
- 8:28SVD to Rust
- 9:57Crates
- 11:08Video signals
- 13:27Timing
- 13:43Pixel Clock
- 14:03Resolution
- 14:41BIOS
- 15:36Display
- 17:37Software
- 19:06The magic number
- 22:16Menu system
- 23:10Art
- 24:46Productivity
- 25:33ASCII art
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