Non PCI VGA controller

Perhaps a PC104 card (ISA type bus) would be easier to hack the interface for- what's the bus on your system?

Paul Burke

Several of Epson's S1Dxxxx series LCD controllers have analog VGA outputs as well as digital LCD outputs. Check them out. They have somewhat ISA-like interfaces. Expensive and long leadtimes, though.

It's a real pain at resolutions > 800x600@16bpp. Once you start looking at high resolutions, for *production* purposes it's easier to move to a CPU with integral PCI bridge (and native OS support for the part, ideally!).

For *prototype* purposes you can take an ISA SVGA card as someone else suggested. But it's rather a lot of work to get it functioning in a non-x86 environment.

There's a crying need for a vga controller with integrated memory that can be slapped onto address and data lines with a minimum amount of hassle. I wished someone would see it and build it.

Look at Fujitsu Graphic Display Controllers. These have direct interface to quite a few 32bit CPU busses. I have not used any of them, but they look quite nice.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Hi, Hatachi did a kit for their lcds with a Yamaha chip. It was sold by farnell at one time quite cheap Hitachi part no LCMEVB-001

Thanks for the suggestions, I already have glue logic from the native bus to ISA for other devices, so anything with an ISA bus will be good. The device is replacing a Cirrus logic GD5428 which is now obsolete.

Regards

Martin

If you are thinking about fpgas, have a look at the Lancelot vga card:

It's designed to work with the Altera Nios development kit, but I'm sure the card (or at least the idea) could be adapted for other systems.