Although I enjoyed to see the PET 2001 being safe and sound again, it was no big deal as most of the work had been done before this RC. The real challenge will be to build a color high resolution graphics extension board for the Commodore PET 2001 and some later models of the PET/CBM series. I’ll name that board ‘CHRE’ for ‘Color High Resolution Extension’ to illustrate it’s affinity to my RC 2015/7 project (HRE) which was monochrome only.
In contrast to the Commodore C64 the PET/CBM 2000, 3000, 4000 and 8000 models were not equipped with pixel graphics or color at all. Therefore we cannot enhance any internal system, we’ll have to start from scratch. What kind of screen should we use? TV-set? 4k curved OLED? The latter isn’t really a retro thingy, so no. A telly would fit to the 40 characters per line of a PET 2000, 3000 and 4000 model but I’d like to support an 80 column text mode (monochrome) for the 8000 models some day. While it’s possible to display 80 columns on a TV-set, the readability won’t be great. Thus we’ll cancel the telly and stick with a more modern standard called VGA. VGA monitors are still available at stores and The Bay. You may find a VGA input connector even on some present-day display systems.
VGA supports multiple resolutions and color modes. There are two limiting factors when it comes to graphic modes:
1) Dot Clock (frequency with which pixels are illuminated on the screen)
2) Video RAM (memory where pixel data is stored).
For a very common VGA mode of 640 by 480 pixels by 256 colors we would have to deal with a Dot Clock of 25.175 MHz and would need 307200 bytes of Video RAM (for you youngsters out there: that is 0.025175 GHz and 0.0003072 GB). Our PET/CBM CPU is an 8 bit processor running at about 1 MHz. Its max. address space is 64 KB. Even 160 by 120 pixels would require a Dot Clock of more than 1 MHz. Magic aside, how can we support any useful VGA mode? Well, we’ll need some kind of GPU and external RAM.
I’ve choosen the Atmel megaAVR series of 8 bit microcontrollers for the GPU. The biggest (in terms of I/O pins and features) and fastest (in terms of instructions per second) controller of this series is the ATmega1284. That’s not exactly true as its little brother ATmega644 needs a cycle less at jump instructions. It remains to be seen if these few cycles are relevant when calculating any time-critical parts of the firmware (aka cycle counting). The external VRAM will be a BSI BS62LV4006PCP55. That’s a 512K x 8 bit 55ns CMOS SRAM in a PDIP-32 package. The first homecomputers with color graphics used weird memory layouts to cope with memory and speed constraints. Our blisteringly fast GPU and nearly infinite VRAM will hopefully allow for a nice memory layout…
So the plan is to head for the following goals:
– color graphics mode with 160 x 200 pixel resolution at 16 colors or better
– color text mode with 40 x 25 characters at 16 colors or better
– minimally invasive connection to the PET 2001
– implement simple graphic functions in GPU firmware
– implement PET control software as a BASIC extension
Only 8 days left. Oops!