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Playing with the screen

A project log for Z80 Computer

Yet another Z80 computer.

james-otsJames Ots 07/04/2017 at 22:310 Comments

This evening I was playing with the screen. It really isn't a great screen to use with a Z80, due to the fact that it uses 16 bits per pixel, and there aren't any hardware accelerated commands on it, except for portrait scrolling. But I think it's just fast enough to be able to use. For example, if I draw head (from the game, Head over Heels) on the screen, I can do it in about 2.5 ms, which means I can draw him 400 times per second. Which should hopefully be fast enough to port Head over Heels to my computer if I decide that's not a completely ridiculous idea.

I'm slightly tempted to use my FPGA board to make an accelerated video controller, but it feels a bit like cheating. If I had enough room left on my CPLD I'd probably add some bits of code to help speed up the screen, but it would need quite a few macrocells, and I don't have many left.

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