A weblog focused on interesting circuits, ideas, schematics and other information about microelectronics and microcontrollers.
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Because I have not tested all electronic circuits mentioned on this pages, I cannot attest to their accuracy; therefore, I do not provide a warranty of any kind and cannot be held responsible in any manner.
Generating TV signal with the PICs
A few schematics of the TV signal generators based on the Microchip's PICs
There are a couple of TV generator circuits around the internet. It is a little bit difficult task because very exact timing is required to generate TV signal.
The best known circuit around is the famous PIC game system by Rickard Gunée. Rickard's circuit is very simple and it is based on the PIC16F84. Rickard has written the generating TV signal using PIC howto
.
The second Rickard's system is the SX game system , which uses the Ubicom's SX microcontroller. The SX's are too fast (50 MIPS) to generating color PAL signal. The essentials of the PAL generating are described by Rickard in his Howto generate color video signals in software
.
Rickard's circuits inspires other people to built their own PIC-based TV generators (mainly game systems). One of them is the VCR pong by David B. Thomas. His system is based on the PIC16C711 (OTP).
The candidate for the "World's Smallest PIC-game ever" award is 8-PIN PONG by Jaakko Hyvätti. His circuit is the minimalistic solution, based on PIC12F675. Unfortunatelly, his game is still unfinished, so only thing his circuit can do is to display the test pattern on the screen.
At the other end stands two sophisticated game systems, based on microcontrollers. I mean the Hydra system (based on the Parallax's Propeller chip, which contains 8 µCs in one package) and the XGameStation system (XGS), based on the Ubicom's SX52 µC.