Wow - so I didn't expect my PCB to work.. but low and behold it does!   I'm not great at soldering (but I guess I'm getting better) and I had to solder two SMT chips to the board along with the usual through hole.  It was almost a disaster multiple times, but due to persistence and solder wick I was able to do it successfully!

Even with everything soldered I was still convinced I probably missed a required rat line or something.. but I plugged it all in and boom!  I had my color bars.. with the added bonus of almost all of the interference is gone;  isolating these higher frequency parts to their own PCB really helped.

So, to recap; my new color generator pcb takes 8 pins: Red, Blue, Green High, Green Low, HSYNC, Select, Vcc, and Gnd.  It then converts everything to a color composite signal and outputs via an RCA composite jack.  Here is the board in all its soldered glory...

And here it is working:

To recap:

The mother board (aka The Island) is in the back left with the red light, that is sending the 8mhz clock signal to the chip on the breadboard (aka Mary Ann) (In the future it will send the full address/data bus etc.).  Mary Ann then uses the 8mhz clock signal to generate RGB colors and an HSYNC signal and sends them to the color generator board.  Every VSYNC Mary Ann sends an interrupt back to The Island so The Island knows when a vertical blank occurred and, in the future, it will be uploading an updated tile set each frame.

My next step is to change colors per pixel instead of every 8 pixels (8 pixels is the width of a tile, which is what the color bars are representing).  8mhz isn't fast enough to do this all on the Mary Ann chip so I'm going to be using a combination of HW such as shift registers to pump out the per pixel colors - I'll go into details and a schematic on my next post.

This is very exciting!