Tag: rp2040

I soldered two bodge wires, taught the HDMI coprocessor to talk back, and made it run the SNES sound chip with real Super Mario World music. It reached 97% of realtime. That number is worth more than a pass.

The HDMI picture was pixel-perfect and still looked soft. Fixing that took one good idea (a 3x full-resolution palette scanout) and one long afternoon of being framed by a heap that only sometimes existed.

Getting real console frames from the H7 to the Feather RP2040 DVI took two days and five separate root causes: a CPU-starving encoder, a FIFO race, a missing ground return, a clock divider that lied to me, and a GPIO port that mutes my DAC.

The Feather RP2040 DVI arrived this morning and had the console's palette on a monitor within 45 minutes of hitting the bench - after a wrong-variant pinout diagram, a factory firmware with no drive, and a 3D printer slicer typing G-code into my REPL.

I bought a 50-pin RGB888-to-HDMI board for the fantasy console, then counted the pins. Two of them are Ethernet, three are the audio bus, and the Nucleo never had 24 to give. The fix might be a second microcontroller whose whole job is HDMI.