I've mentioned Xosera briefly before, but in case you missed it, Xosera is a fully open-source FPGA-based video adapter created by my good friend @Xark . In the words of the project's Github:

Inspired in concept by it's "namesake" the Commander X16's VERA, Xosera is an original open-source video adapter design, built with open-source tools, that is being tailored with features appropriate for a Motorola 68K era retro computer.

Until now, video on the rosco_m68k has been a slightly hit-and-miss affair, with the main video card being the V9958-based one I designed last year. This is a nice little card, and works well, but suffers a couple of fairly major problems:

• The V9958 is super-hard to get (at least if you care about getting genuine, working chips)
• The 15KHz RGB video output (via SCART) isn't great if you're in a part of the world where SCART isn't really a thing
• The V9958, while nice, is more suited to 8-bit-era machines. For rosco_m68k, I wanted something with a bit more power!

Xark's been working on Xosera since fairly early on in the rosco_m68k timeline, and things have really heated up a bit lately since we decided that Xosera should be the standard video for the next rosco_m68k machine. Based on that, I (finally) got it together and designed the m68k bus interface board I'd been promising for months, and from there Xark has been doing fantastic work, delivering major new features and improvements almost daily.

As well as having Xosera be the video on the next rosco_m68k, we also want to support the existing models too, so the first prototype bus board is designed as an expansion that works with all rosco_m68k models. It's in the prototype stages yet, so rather than having the FPGA and supporting hardware on-board, it accepts an Upduino 3.0 that plugs in and provides all the FPGA goodness. Likewise for the video interface - rather than hardwire for (e.g.) VGA a standard PMOD interface is used, allowing Xark free-reign during the prototyping and development stage - for example using HDMI rather than VGA for output.

The prototype board looks like this:

In true prototype style there's lot of extra jumpers and test points on there for us to use while debugging things, but the bring-up was pretty much effortless in the end. Aside from a minor issue (my fault) in which I got the POD pinout the wrong way around, it works great. Populated and hooked up (with PMOD on wires to correct for inverted pinout), it looks like this:

We're not quite at the graphics mode yet, but have a couple of very-capable (and fast, this thing comfortably runs zero-wait-state on a 12MHz 68020, even on fast tight fill loops running out of on-die cache) text modes. Here's a little "tech demo" snake game I threw together while playing with it (in 100% m68k assembly):

Here it is displaying something like 4096 colours at once (this time driven by Xark's AVR testbed, which he built while waiting for his prototype m68k PCB):

This is very cool as it uses the advanced auxiliary registers provided by Xosera to monitor beam position and do clever things at just the right time. 

And finally, here's a short video from the "self-test" sequence Xark wrote for AVR, and which I ported to m68k (keeping it in C++ and building with the rosco_m68k GCC toolchain). This is running at 848x480 at 60Hz (via VGA).

Between Xosera and @MarkM's awesome work on IDE (that deserves its own log, which will be up soon!) things are moving fast over in rosco_m68k land. Be sure to like and follow the project for more, and for up-to-the-minute news come and join us on Discord. 

To stay up to date with Xosera, be sure to like and follow Xark's project, and take a look at his log which has more of the juicy details. You'll find a lot more FPGA detail over there too.