Open source, stand alone, ASCII terminal project

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- On Mon, 12/1/08, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> 
> Ah, thanks for the clarification.  My mind was telling me
> that we 
> were talking about a monochrome terminal (never used
> anything else, 
> so I'm stuck like a fly in amber).

> If it's a simple monochrome monitor that you're
> after, there's a very 
> simple one in one of the Atmel app notes that can be
> implemented in a 
> single AVR ATMega8 micro.  

That's what the original thread was about... <grin>

It started out as an announcement of a very, very cool project to turn a standard PC VGA monitor and PS/2 keyboard into a functional RS-232 terminal. The question was raised as to why it couldn't use an NTSC monitor, and thus forked into a question about the suitability of NTSC displays and 80 column text... and here we are again. Fun with topic drift :) It's way too easy to start answering individual questions, and skew away from the original post.

I'm really very excited about the original poster's project. While I certainally have enough terminals myself so as to not need another, I really like terminals, and I would be definitely interested in building one of these to follow along.

I believe that the original decision of using PS/2 keyboards and VGA monitors is probably the best. While an NTSC display is more "vintage", it's also much, much easier to get suitable PC VGA displays than it would be to get a *good* NTSC display these days - and VGA displays are much better suited to text than the standard old video monitor. More stable, less flicker, sharper, and no doubt easier to interface modern stuffs to, especially if those modern stuffs want to do any sort of color.

PS/2 keyboards are also a good choice. While not as "classic" as the parallel ASCII keyboard, they're much more available, and much more standardized. And, they're easy to interface to.

I'm definitely going to check out this project, and if I have time, build one myself. I'm a wire-wrap and soldering iron kind of guy, a premade PCB would take half the fun out of it :)  I really appreciate that this is designed around components that are within the realm of a solder-slinger like myself. I'm good with through-hole, I have an EPROM programmer. Never worked with CPLD's, and I don't know VHDL. Z80 assembler, on the other hand...

-Ian