The Ocean is the graphics board for this project.  It will consist of two parts: Ginger, who will translate the display lists into tiles and sprites and place them into scan line buffers, and Mary Ann who will take the scan line buffers and output them to composite color (NTSC).

I will be starting on Mary Ann first, I have the schematic mostly designed and I'll be posting it here after a final review.  The goal will be for her to output color bars for each of the 16 colors.  To do this, she'll start up and write tiles to the scan line buffer, each tile will be a solid block of one of the supported colors.  From that point on she'll loop, reading the scan line buffer and outputting the NTSC compatible format.

In the future it'll be Ginger who writes to the scan line buffers (they will be double buffered) and Mary Ann will simply read from them - but to remove complexity I'll focus purely on Mary Ann for now.

I think Mary Ann will be the toughest part of the project, she'll have to be in pure assembly and match NTSC timings perfectly - and I plan to only run her at 8mhz which means adding some additional HW functionality to help meet the timing requirements of NTSC (I'll go into more of that later).

So that's it for tonight - exciting times of joy and salty tears lie ahead!