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A project log for Novasaur CP/M TTL Retrocomputer

Retrocomputer built from TTL logic running CP/M with no CPU or ALU

alastair-hewittAlastair Hewitt 07/04/2020 at 04:300 Comments

It's been a month since the last log, so I thought I'd check in. Other priorities have taken over a bit so I'll cover one minor change that was made to the PCB design. This started with an examination of the Video DAC placement to see if the current VGA connector could be changed.

The original PCB design used a low-profile VGA connector due to space constraints. Not only did this cost 2.5x as much, but the only distributor was out of stock for 4 months. This is a big risk for a kit version, so the change was made to fit the more common larger-sized connector.

The original video DAC had to be moved and it was a good chance to re-examine the design. Calculating the resistor values for the DAC gets quite complicated, so in the end it was just easier to simulate the circuit and play with it.

The circuit above shows the channels of a 3-bit DAC with resistors used to divide down each bit by a factor of two. The analog switch has a fairly large on resistance shown as a 150 ohm load in series with a transmission line to the monitor load of 75 ohms. The state shown in the circuit is with the most-significant bit high and the other two bits low. Low does not mean off, these other outputs are sinking current in their low state.

The circuit assumes a high voltage of 3.2V and a low voltage of 0.3V. The 150 ohm resistance of the switch comes from the data sheet for the CD4053 being driven with a VCC-VEE voltage of 10V (the negative VEE is supplied by the RS232 driver).

There are a couple of drawbacks with this simple DAC design. Since the low voltage is never 0V then there is no completely black color, only very dark gray. Since the blue channel is only two bits it varies from 0-3, where the red and green vary from 0-7. Seven doesn't divide into three, so there are no actual gray colors.

The on resistance of the analog switch also changes as the chip warms up. The resistance could change by up to 20% from an initial 150 ohms at 25C to 180 ohms at 60C. The following color palettes were generated from the simulation to show the difference between 150, 165, and 180 ohms:

The difference is fairly subtle, so the temperature change shouldn't be too noticeable. For comparison, this would be the ideal palette with the correct DAC voltages:

There are no resistors used with the 8-color text "DAC". Each bit is passed directly to the analog switch, which when combined with the monitor load divides the voltage by 3.2. This gives a value of about 0.1V for low and 1V for high. The text mode will always saturate the color, but also never be completely black.

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