Our great sponsors
-
esp_8_bit
Atari 8 bit computers, NES and SMS game consoles on your TV with nothing more than a ESP32 and a sense of nostalgia
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
> Atari 8 bit computers, NES and SMS game consoles on your TV with nothing more than a ESP32 and a sense of nostalgia
https://github.com/rossumur/esp_8_bit
NTSC color requires a precise frequency, but if you're fine with just black and white, you can generate NTSC B&W using an Arduino Nano (16 MHz 8-bit processor) and a couple resistors and crocodile clips and an RCA cable. (PAL B&W is similar and also possible.) There are even libraries that make it super easy; I have used this one: https://github.com/Avamander/arduino-tvout (IIRC I needed to fix a couple things to get it to compile).
With Raspberry Pi Picos and their 133 MHz clock rate it seems it's possible to even generate HDMI (and there are youtube videos demonstrating this).
I recently bought a couple crystals to generate the NTSC color subcarrier frequency. The Arduino Nano only has 2 KB of RAM so it's a very tight fit but I'm daydreaming about running a tiny BASIC interpreter on it like to build something similar to an old 80s computer that boots right into BASIC. (There's a small amount of free CPU time between frames and between scanlines, but my calculations indicated that you'd get a fraction of the performance of a C64, especially if you wanted to extend the RAM a bit (which wouldn't be directly addressable)).