The display controller chip seems to be a hard to source part if you want to stick to 80s components. Do you know what his recommendation would be for that piece?
Yes, that’s been a frustration for me. I’ve settled on the Motorola 6847 which requires a couple supporting chips. This is scavenging parts off eBay though, which seems to be a plentiful source. I’ll find out shortly whether any of them are actually good.
Not an unreasonable choice, but it has to be noted that home computers of the era already used LSI/VLSI dedicated ICs for this purpose, condensing the functionality of these 20 chips into a single package.