Espeon VS FabGL

I made a gameboy emulator called Espeon a few years ago. If this were a M5Stack or any other ESP32 kit, you could say it would be an Espeon running Espeon lol

So did the other member of the "trinity", the TRS-80 model I.

My mental picture is that the kind of display controller I'd like to build is about two large breadboards stuffed with 54xx chips. Such a thing is a bit simpler than a minimal CPU but not that much simpler because you need the stuff to interface with memory.

Almost everybody who builds throwback computers today uses either an FPGA or a microcontroller for the display controller. For instance

https://github.com/fdivitto/FabGL

is a highly flexible controller implemented for the ESP32 which can do tile-based graphics and sprites for games but also emulate an ANSI terminal. This is used in this SBC

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/AgonLight2/o...

which I am going to highly recommend because this machine is compatible with the old Z80 machines but has a real 24 bit mode with 24 bit registers and also performs an order of magnitude better than any Z80 machine did back in the day.

Modern systems usually avoid the unified memory model that was popular back in the day but that also usually held back the performance of the CPU because one way or another the VDC was stealing cycles. The AgonLight board communicates with the display controller through a serial port, for instance.

This thing

http://www.commanderx16.com/

has a memory mapped register for the address in video RAM the CPU wants to read/write and another for the data. The address register will auto-increment when access the data register so you can read or write video RAM at high speed just by repeatedly accessing the data register. The CX-16 uses an FPGA as a display controller

https://github.com/X16Community/x16-docs/blob/master/X16%20R...

Why not base it on ESP32? You can emulate multiple OS-es, including Commodore VIC20, MS-DOS, Windows 3.0, Linux ELKS - all using FabGL: https://github.com/fdivitto/FabGL

Some ideas can be borrowed from here: https://github.com/fdivitto/FabGL

I would like to use TTGO VGA32 as a programming environment for children to learn how to code like it's 1999. Only basic tools, a code editor and a compiler/interpreter, no web browser, no Stack Overflow, no code completion. See this article for a rationale. Now, what developer environment would be the best fit? FabGL provides PC Emulator with a selection of OS-es: CP/M, FreeDOS, MS-DOS, SvarDOS, ELKS, GEOS, GEM. Which would be the best OS? Apart from BASIC and Turbo Pascal/C++ or Watcom C++, which useful dev tools for 80186 should it contain? Micropython, Lua, Wasm3? What do you think of it?

You will want to follow the advice given by u/Stitch10925 and u/Ikebook89. If you take a look in the src/fonts folder in the FabGL library you will find many bitmapped fonts including a 5x8 and a 6x8 font. Either of these sound like exactly what you need.

https://github.com/fdivitto/fabgl is pretty much everything you'd ever want from an ESP32