Elminster wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 10:57 pm
If all the 'enhanced' features of videonula were hacked out, could you lose any of the hardware/reduce costs and would it be 100% backwards compatiable.
I think it would probably only reduce the component count slightly as you would only really lose the 12 resistors from the DACs. It may be possible to use a slightly cheaper CPLD - I chose the EPM570 as I wanted space for the extra palette so didn't consider smaller designs. If the original ULA fits into something like the EPM240, it would knock a few pounds off the price.
However, about half the cost is in the time taken to build, test, clean and re-test the boards. This still takes a fair bit of time per board even though I've gradually got quicker at the soldering part!
On compatibility, it's possible to put the VideoNuLA in a fully-compatible mode by issuing *VNDISABLE ROM command (or by a simple poke if you don't have the ROM installed). This effectively tells the hardware to ignore writes to the additional registers so it behaves like the original ULA.
Elminster wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 10:57 pm
What I am sort of saying is how hard/cost would it be to produce a VULA replacement as opposed to the endhance version.
It wouldn't be that hard but I'm not sure there'd be enough of a price differential to make it worthwhile. If it's something that enough people are interested in, I'd be happy to look into it in more detail.
Elminster wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 10:57 pm
Not sure if my rambling make sense, made sense in my head.
Makes perfect sense
