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Author here! Trivia: I really, really wanted it to run Doom, so that I could have a section titled "But Does It Run Doom?". This is challenging with no screen;

Author here! Trivia: I really, really wanted it to run Doom, so that I could have a section titled "But Does It Run Doom?". This is challenging with no screen; SDL has an experimental ASCII backend where in theory you could draw terminal graphics over SSH. But it refused to cross compile despite repeated efforts. So, sadly it does not in fact run Doom.

NBJack 3y ago
In other words, it doesn't run Doom yet. Great project, and excellent execution!
qbasic_forever 3y ago
What if you make a USB network device gadget and serve a mjpeg video stream to it that's the framebuffer/screen output? Web browsers or VLC on the host can show the video, and if you can get ffmpeg compiled and running on the device I think it has a fbdev input that can capture the framebuffer directly and likely convert it to a mjpeg stream (even acting as a http or rtmp, etc. server).
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This is such a cool project but you also did fantastic documentation which was certainly quite a bit of work too so thank you!
crote 3y ago
The chip already seems to have an integrated display interface, with a nice dedicated PAL/NTSC output pin. Why not use that?
messe 3y ago
More of a suggestion for a future design, but how about using DOOM's software rendering over X forwarding (potentially over SSH)? You'd need to have the card present itself as a network interface, which would add to the complexity and cost however. What's the highest baud rate the serial interface supports? You could theoretically get PPP over serial working, but I suspect at best you could only manage a few frames per second. 320x200x4bpp at 1fps requires a 256k baud rate minimum, and that's just streaming the video, without any overhead—I suppose you could apply compression: ssh -C with the "none" cipher; or just compress each frame as a PNG, but I'm thinking outloud—this would probably involve writing your own renderer.
- antoinealb 3y ago
  With the USB gadget Driver in Linux you can have the existing USB Hardware enumerate as a USB Ethernet adapter without too much config work so that would not add much to the BoM :)
randombits0 3y ago
“It’s cheap enough to give away. If you get one from me, I’m probably trying to impress you.” Mission accomplished! Well done, sir.
fallat 3y ago
Did you see https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/LinuxDevice.html https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/LinuxDevice.html ?
- mike_hock 3y ago
  plz build dis
TZubiri 3y ago
But can't the computer boot from usb? Then you could just modify the display memory. The challenge would be figuring out what the display memory is, you'd need a strong knowledge of display standards.

NBJack 3y ago

In other words, it doesn't run Doom yet. Great project, and excellent execution!

qbasic_forever 3y ago

What if you make a USB network device gadget and serve a mjpeg video stream to it that's the framebuffer/screen output? Web browsers or VLC on the host can show the video, and if you can get ffmpeg compiled and running on the device I think it has a fbdev input that can capture the framebuffer directly and likely convert it to a mjpeg stream (even acting as a http or rtmp, etc. server).

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

This is such a cool project but you also did fantastic documentation which was certainly quite a bit of work too so thank you!

crote 3y ago

The chip already seems to have an integrated display interface, with a nice dedicated PAL/NTSC output pin. Why not use that?

messe 3y ago

More of a suggestion for a future design, but how about using DOOM's software rendering over X forwarding (potentially over SSH)? You'd need to have the card present itself as a network interface, which would add to the complexity and cost however. What's the highest baud rate the serial interface supports? You could theoretically get PPP over serial working, but I suspect at best you could only manage a few frames per second. 320x200x4bpp at 1fps requires a 256k baud rate minimum, and that's just streaming the video, without any overhead—I suppose you could apply compression: ssh -C with the "none" cipher; or just compress each frame as a PNG, but I'm thinking outloud—this would probably involve writing your own renderer.

antoinealb 3y ago
With the USB gadget Driver in Linux you can have the existing USB Hardware enumerate as a USB Ethernet adapter without too much config work so that would not add much to the BoM :)

randombits0 3y ago

“It’s cheap enough to give away. If you get one from me, I’m probably trying to impress you.” Mission accomplished! Well done, sir.

fallat 3y ago

Did you see https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/LinuxDevice.html https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/LinuxDevice.html ?

mike_hock 3y ago
plz build dis

TZubiri 3y ago

But can't the computer boot from usb? Then you could just modify the display memory. The challenge would be figuring out what the display memory is, you'd need a strong knowledge of display standards.