Now that I have what I believe to be a functioning prototype of the BX-Plorer design, I have reached out to Crowd Supply to see if they think this project is worthy of crowd-funding and selling through their website. So far, after about a week of waiting, I have not heard anything back from them. Their website does not provide any indication of how long I should have to wait for an answer. I've opened a support ticket with C/S as well, but again, no response. If C/S doesn't respond within another week or so, I shall start looking into selling my kits elsewhere.
In the mean time, I have placed an order for three Digilent PMod VGA adapters. (Three, because these things are easy to lose!) Although these adapters support 4 bits per gun (and, thus, support 4096 colors maximum), I can only use 3 at the moment because of my previous wiring mistake. Still, it should work for the purposes of demonstration.
Another thing I'd really love to hear back from C/S about is my outstanding order for five more TinyFPGA BX modules. Back in December, they said that they expect a new shipping date some time in January. I sure hope they haven't forgotten about me. I'll give them until February before I contact them again about my order.
While waiting for all this stuff to work itself out, I've been making progress on the font editor demo. Here's the latest screenshot (taken off a Commodore 128 emulator), and is a good representation of what it should look like on an RC2014 with a VDC-II card as well. I still need to write the code to render all the characters inside the table cells, to scroll the glyph palette table up and down as appropriate (to allow selecting any of the 512 supported characters), and of course, the actual editor interface as well. Still, progress is progress.
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