That was then. This is now

When I was 11, I think, I would hang out with my cousin and we'd type BASIC listings into his prized 8K Commodore PET.  Often these would be from a large-format book of computer games by David Ahl.


And on page 146 was this delightful hack:


We were fascinated by this tiny program. The math was beyond us, but something hypnotic about the undulating curve captured my imagination. Looking back, maybe it was the start of a lifelong interest in graphics.

Well, that was then and this is now. The Gameduino Dazzler's text mode is up and running. The first thing I did with it was to recreate that old demo on the newly-alive hardware.


Close up:


The font is IBM Plex Mono - it's quite readable down to 11 point. The terminal emulation supports several formats, in both landscape and portrait format. The portrait mode here gives a text screen that is 80 columns by 80 rows.


The old TermDriver worked by having a microcontroller listen on a serial port, and emulate a terminal using the graphics on a FT810. Dazzler works similarly. The microcontroller (in this case a J1 Forth core running on the FPGA) listens to a serial line and draws the terminal emulation on a BT815.

The upshot is that the Dazzler shows whatever passes over the 115200 baud serial port on the HDMI monitor. So you can use it to add a great-looking ANSI terminal for your micro - whether it's an Arduino, MicroPython, or something else.

Thanks for reading.