modern CRT8002 IC replacement/substitute?

[arnold.exe]

I'm working on repairing a couple of BigBoard II systems, and they both have busted CRT8002 chips, broken in wildly different ways. I checked all the signals, they look pretty good, they're just displaying the wrong characters or glyphs that aren't even in any of the character sets. And they're definitely running using the internal character ROM.

I'm sure this wasn't the most common of all the character generators, but I figured someone had made a substitute now, but I haven't been able to find anything. Makes me want to take a crack at one with one of the raspberry pi picos I have.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Elm-chan did a clone of another obsolete CRTC using a Xilinx XC95108 CPLD. His was quite a it more complex than the simple 8002, doing RGB etc. You might want to take a look at his work.

 

[arnold.exe]

Elm-chan did a clone of another obsolete CRTC using a Xilinx XC95108 CPLD. His was quite a it more complex than the simple 8002, doing RGB etc. You might want to take a look at his work.

I'll say this is probably beyond my abilities to come up with, but it's a fascinating read. Thanks for mentioning it. http://elm-chan.org/works/crtc/report.html

 

[Chuck(G)]

I'm of the opinion that many older CRT controllers, particularly those that output signals intended for old-school (e.g. 15KHz horizontal) CRT displays will become harder to find. On the other hand, I suspect that there are still a bazillion 6845 CRTCs running around.

 

[arnold.exe]

I think I'm going to temper my ambitions and just go for NOS 8002s off ebay...got one and it worked right off the bat. But I doubt any of these will last forever.