[thrtythreeforty]

Author here! Trivia: I really, really wanted it to run Doom, so that I could have a section titled "But Does It Run Doom?". This is challenging with no screen; SDL has an experimental ASCII backend where in theory you could draw terminal graphics over SSH. But it refused to cross compile despite repeated efforts.

So, sadly it does not in fact run Doom.

[NBJack]

In other words, it doesn't run Doom yet. Great project, and excellent execution!

[randombits0]

“It’s cheap enough to give away. If you get one from me, I’m probably trying to impress you.”

Mission accomplished! Well done, sir.

[qbasic_forever]

What if you make a USB network device gadget and serve a mjpeg video stream to it that's the framebuffer/screen output? Web browsers or VLC on the host can show the video, and if you can get ffmpeg compiled and running on the device I think it has a fbdev input that can capture the framebuffer directly and likely convert it to a mjpeg stream (even acting as a http or rtmp, etc. server).

[fallat]

Did you see https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/LinuxDevice.html ?

[mike_hock]

plz build dis

[crote]

The chip already seems to have an integrated display interface, with a nice dedicated PAL/NTSC output pin. Why not use that?

[AndrewKemendo]

This is such a cool project but you also did fantastic documentation which was certainly quite a bit of work too so thank you!

[messe]

More of a suggestion for a future design, but how about using DOOM's software rendering over X forwarding (potentially over SSH)? You'd need to have the card present itself as a network interface, which would add to the complexity and cost however.

What's the highest baud rate the serial interface supports? You could theoretically get PPP over serial working, but I suspect at best you could only manage a few frames per second. 320x200x4bpp at 1fps requires a 256k baud rate minimum, and that's just streaming the video, without any overhead—I suppose you could apply compression: ssh -C with the "none" cipher; or just compress each frame as a PNG, but I'm thinking outloud—this would probably involve writing your own renderer.

[antoinealb]

With the USB gadget Driver in Linux you can have the existing USB Hardware enumerate as a USB Ethernet adapter without too much config work so that would not add much to the BoM :)

[TZubiri]

But can't the computer boot from usb? Then you could just modify the display memory. The challenge would be figuring out what the display memory is, you'd need a strong knowledge of display standards.