TV Output Wing

Demo

Quick Links

• Forum thread
  
• Source code
  
• Schematic in PDF format
  
• EAGLE PCB Design on Github
  
• Purchase PCB at BatchPCB
  
• Parts List at Mouser
  

Status

• 7/13/2011 Revision 1.0 of Wing was designed and submitted to BatchPCB for manufacturing.
  
• 7/15/2011 The design is available for $8 at BatchPCB, please be aware that it is not verified yet and may not work correctly.
  
• 7/26/2011 Design is built and verified. There is an issue with the example bit file having the pins defined in opposite of the Wing.
  

Details

BenL is working on a Sega Master implementation on the Papilio FPGA board. During that process he created a TV Output Wing:

"This TV output wing could be an interesting replacement for the VGA+jack outputs of the arcade kit. It's a very simple R-2R ladder 7 bit DAC for the video line, and a plain low pass filter for the audio (the DAC must be implemented through logic).

You can very easily output B/W video, and colors with some efforts :"

The schematics :

You should use R=115 ohms and 2R=230 ohms to get 0.3V from "010000" (black) on the input and 1.0V from "110000" (white), the remaining "001111" being left for color modulation at high luminance.

A picture of the homemade prototype :

Color Test Bar

A small demo : compile this, plug your tv_output wing in A8-A15 and enjoy 8 color bars in the middle of the screen: yellow, cyan, green,magenta,red, blue, black and white. And overscan is grey.

You can switch in main.vhd between pal and ntsc (*_video to produce the correct sync, *_encoder to transform rgb to quadrature modulated yuv)

The image is good, but far from perfect: low sat on yellow and cyan, interferences between luminance and color carrier, some dot crawl (although you might not notice it because it scrolls vertically really fast)

Schematic:BPW5035-TV-Video.pdf

How it works

You need to generate sync, luminance (monochrome image) and color information. Seehttp://www.deetc.ise...ds/doc/ch08.pdf for details on the theory.

The provided encoder turns 2 bit RGB (64 colors) into YUV by a table lookup, and modulates the U/V signals by multiplying them by a square wave at the color carrier frequency (3.45MHz for NTSC, 4.62MHz for PAL) in phase (for U) and quadrature (for V). The color clok is generated from a 64MHz clock (thanks to a 21 bits accumulator), itself derived from the main 32MHz clock of the Papilio.

sync, Y, U and V are summed into the FPGA, and converted by the R-2R DAC into the corresponding voltage: the resistor values are chosen to turn the 3.3V of the Papilio output into the 0, 0.3 and 1.0V under 75 ohms that the tv requires.

Useful Links

• NTSC/PAL Theory
  
• Information on converting Video Formats