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HDMI "Mode 0" Text Output functional on the Spartan Edge FPGA

A project log for Project Ember

Homebrew Retro-Inspired 32-bit CPU And Video Game System

tomTom 01/16/2022 at 18:580 Comments

While I have been working on the emulator and assembler, I have also been playing around with the Seeed Spartan Edge FPGA. After watching an untold number of videos on You Tube, and reading through a few (unfortunately too few) GitHub projects, I have managed to implement an HDMI output example in Verilog for the Spartan 7 FPGA.

Spartan Edge FPGA

It currently only supports a single resolution at a time, set to 1280x720 for now. I have tentatively called "Mode 0" (the only one at this point really) as an 80x45 character text mode using a 16x16 bit ASCII font. For this test case, I store both the default VRAM contents (80x45 bytes) and the font (128x2x16...half the ASCII character set, plus 2 by 16 bytes for each character bitmap) in block RAM on the FPGA.

FPGA HDMI Output
The next step for the FPGA project is to create some code to write data to the dual-port block RAM, so the HDMI output can display text. I figure the first step for that is to work on the ALU and CPU pipeline implementation. That will at least allow some part of reading and writing to memory.




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