Raspberry Pico Adventures

Last post I talked about the amazing PicoVGA library. In this post I talk about my first experiences in using it to implement a text mode that I can use in may serial terminal. The first line is truncated, it turned out I only need to adjust the monitor.

Continuing my search for a way to implement an alphanumeric serial terminal with the Raspberry Pi Pico, I found the extraordinary   PicoVGA  project. It is a very complete library for generating video for VGA monitors, with incredible examples. PicoVGA demo

My first objective in studying video generation with the RP2040 is to construct a serial terminal to use with my retro microprocessor projects (based on Z80, 6502, etc). For this I want an alphanumeric color video with at least 24 rows of 80 characters. I tried to make something alike the CGA/EGA/VGA alphanumeric mode, storing in the video memory the characters code and an attribute byte and generating in real-time the corresponding pixels. This looked something viable with the official solution, but I ended up having a hard time making the basic scheme work and had to settle on 40 columns. It works - in 40 columns