[jaak]

Not to take away from Quinn Dunki's accomplishments, one big difference is the Veronica used an ATmega 324PA - basically an 8 bit 20 MIPS RISC CPU.

Generating a VGA signal is trivial for this powerful chip. Entire retro game consoles have been built with similar ATmega chips alone

Ben Eater is building a VGA card from discrete components, a somewhat more difficult task. The first part covers building the H/V timing sync circuit (no programmable clock source here!). It's worth taking a look if you're into this kind of thing.

[dotancohen]

Even more amazing, after watching Ben's video, I was thinking too myself "That wasn't so hard". Other than a few Arduino projects I've never used an IC, but I was able to follow along with Ben completely.

In fact, I think that a tutorial dedicated just to explain the VGA standard, the same length as Ben's tutorial, would have been less clear and informative.

[userbinator]

Generating a VGA signal is trivial for this powerful chip. Entire retro game consoles have been built with similar ATmega chips alone

For comparison, a slightly less powerful microcontroller can do this:

https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/

[mrob]

>Ben Eater is building a VGA card from discrete components

From 7400 series devices, which are very simple integrated circuits by modern standards, but still integrated circuits.

[tyingq]

"From 7400 series devices, which are very simple integrated circuits by modern standards"

So it's clear, a 74xx is just a bunch of NAND gates. Nothing at all higher level than that.

[deaddodo]

To be fair, it's almost impossible to build anything out of fully discrete components these days. If you use a TO series transistor, you could argue those are also ICs and vacuum tubes/relays aren't cheap or too easily accessible.

[h2odragon]

Similar to the difference between asm (discrete), C (low level logic ICs), and Python (ATmega).

[kazen44]

Also, his video makes it seem rather easy aswell. The scanline circuitry is quite simple.

[prvc]

>Also, his video makes it seem rather easy aswell. The scanline circuitry is quite simple.

Making it seem easy != easy