COPROCESSOR AS 6845

GRAPHIC CARD
-VIGNESH.R, 2011212025, M.E.(E.S.T), Ist YEAR.

WHAT IS CO-PROCESSOR ?

A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, Signal processing, string processing, or encryption. By offloading processor-intensive tasks from the main processor, coprocessors can accelerate system performance Coprocessors allow a line of computers to be customized, so that customers who do not need the extra performance need not pay for it. These processors require the host main processor to fetch the coprocessor instructions and handle all other operations aside from the coprocessor functions Eg. Motorola 68881/68882 , Intel 80386 , sound blaster X-FI

VIDEO DISPLAY CONTROLLERS

VDC - Integrated circuit which is the main component in a video signal generator a device responsible for the production of TV video signal in a computing (or) game system. - can also generate audio signals

- responsible for generating the timing of necessary video signals such as horizontal and vertical synchronization signals and blanking interval. - it functions as a coprocessor that can manipulate video RAM contents independently

VIDEO DISPLAY CONTROLLERS VS. VIDEO DISPLAY PROCESSORS

VDCs VDCs

could not generate graphics

donot have the special hardware accelerators to create 2D & 3D graphics only controls the timing of the Video synchronization signals and the access to the Video RAM but VDP can process the contents of Video RAM.

VDCs

VIDEO DISPLAY CONTROLLER

CRTC -generates video timings, reads data from RAM and output via character generator or directly Video shifters -get data from CPU and convert to serial bits with sync. signals

Video interface controller -RAM based character generator sets & video RAM dedicated to colour.

Video coprocessors -own internal CPU dedicated to read & write to their own RAM & converting contents of this video RAM to video signal ; CPU can give only commands

MOTOROLA 6845:
The chip generates the signals necessary to interface with a faster display but does not generate the actual pixels !
contribute cursor and video-blanking information to the pixel video (intensity) signals to produce correctly timed horizontal and vertical sync and provide the address in memory from which the next pixel or set of pixels should be read The sync generation includes generation of horizontal and vertical video blanking signals, which are used to condition the external pixel generation circuits process of reading that value, converting it into pixels, and sending it to a CRT is left to other circuits

6845(CONTD.)

systems using the 6845 may have very different numbers and values of colors, or may not support color at all internal latch is provided which when triggered will duplicate and retain a copy of the video address so that it can later be read back by the CPU light pens and light guns which can function by sending a pulse to the 6845 when the electron beam passes, allowing a running program to read back the location that was pointed at Because all aspects of video timing are programmable, a single machine can switch between NTSC and PAL timings in software

INTERFACING CRT CONTROLLER(6845)

MOTOROLA 6845

GENERATION OF COLOR GRAPHICS

ADDRESS

INTERNALS OF 6845:

18 8-bit registers controlling all aspects of video timings Only two addresses are exposed to external components - one to select which internal register is to be read or written to and another to access that register The 6845 is intended for character based displays Address composed of two parts i. 14 bit character address

ii. 5 bit row address

RA0-RA4

CA0-CA13

the 6845 can address 214+5 = 512 kb of memory

INTERNALS(CONTD.)

character address increases linearly When the chip signals horizontal sync it increases the row address If the row address does not equal the programmatically set number of rows per character then the character address is reset to have the same value as it did at the beginning of the current scan line. Otherwise the row address is reset to zero

If the character address is used to look up a character reference in RAM and the row address to index a table of character graphics in ROM an ordinary TEXT MODE display is constructed.

INTERNALS(CONTD.)

The 6845 reads the start address for its display once per frame If the internal timing values on the chip are altered at the correct time it can be made to prepare for a new frame without ending the current one

Thus creating a non-continuous break in generated addresses midway through the display
This is commonly used by games to provide one moving area of the display (usually the play field) and one static (usually a status display).

Specifications
The Color Graphics Adapter uses a standard DE-9 connector

Connector description:
Pin assignments Pin 1 2 3 4 Ground Ground Red Green Function

5
6 7 8 9

Blue
Intensity Reserved Horizontal Sync Vertical Sync

Signal
Type Resolution H-freq V-freq Colors Digital, TTL 640h 200v, 320h 200v 15.75 kHz 60 Hz 16

CONFIGURING 6845

Despite varying bit depths in 6845's graphics mode, 6845 processes colors in its palette in four bits, yielding 24 = 16 different colors

The four color bits are arranged according to the RGBI color model:
The lower three bits represent i.red ii.green

iii. blue color components

fourth "intensifier" bit increases the brightness of all three color components (red, green, and blue) of the pixels it is set for.

The highest display resolution of any mode was 640200, and the highest color depth supported was 4-bit (16 colors).

WITH RGBI MONITOR

These four bits are passed on unmodified to the DE-9 connector

at the back of the card, leaving all color processing to the RGBI monitor

Full CGA 16-color palette black gray The monitor would use approximately the following formula to 0 8 #000000 #555555 process the digital four-bit color number to analog voltages ranging from 0.0 to 1.0: blue light blue 1 9 #0000AA #5555FF red := 2/3(colorNumber & 4)/4 + 1/3(colorNumber & 8)/8 green light green green := 2/3(colorNumber & 2)/2 + 1/3(colorNumber & 8)/8 2 10 #00AA00 #55FF55 blue := 2/3(colorNumber & 1)/1 + 1/3(colorNumber & 8)/8 cyan light cyan Color 6 is treated differently; when using the formula above, color 6 would 3 11 #00AAAA #55FFFF become dark yellow, but in order to achieve a more pleasing brown tone, red light red special circuitry in most RGBI monitors, including the IBM 5153 color 4 12 #FF5555 display makes an exception for color 6 and changes its hue from #AA0000 dark yellow to brown by halving the analogue green signal's amplitude:magenta light magenta 5 13 #AA00AA #FF55FF if colorNumber = 6 then green := green / 2 brown yellow It is this "RGBI with tweaked brown" palette, shown in the complete 6 14 #AA5500 #FFFF55 palette to the right. light gray white (high intensi 7 15 #AAAAAA #FFFFFF

STANDARD TEXT MODES

4025 characters: (in up to 16 colors)i. Each character is a pattern of 88 dots. The effective screen resolution in this mode is 320200 pixels though individual pixels cannot be addressed independently

ii. The choice of patterns for any location is thus limited to one of the 256 available characters, the patterns for which are stored in a ROM chip on the card itself iii.The display font in text mode (the code page 437 character set) is therefore fixed and cannot be changed (although when using the original IBM CGA, it is possible to select one of two different fontsnormal or thinby changing a jumper. The card has sufficient video RAM for eight different text pages in this mode.
o

8025 characters (in up to 16 colors)i. Each character is again an 88 dot pattern (the same character set is used as for 4025).

ii.The effective screen resolution of this mode is 640200 pixels. Again, the pixels cannot be individually addressed. Since there are twice as many characters on the screen in this mode iii. The card has enough video RAM for just four different text pages

STANDARD GRAPHICS #MODE Palette 1

320200 pixels: i.as with the 4025 text mode ii. In the graphics mode, however, each pixel can be accessed independently iii. The tradeoff is that only four colors can be displayed at a time. Also, only one of the four colors can be freely chosen from the 16 CGA colorsonly two official palettes for this mode

Palette 1 in high intensity 0 default default 1 3 cyan 11 light cyan 2 5 magenta 13 light magenta 3 7 white 15 white (high in Palette 0 in # Palette 0 high intensity 0 default default 1 2 green 10 light green 2 4 red 12 light red 3 6 brown 14 yellow

Using palette 0:

Using palette 1:

STANDARD GRAPHICS(CONTD.)

640200 pixels :

i.as with the 8025 text mode ii.All pixels can be addressed independently ,by default the colors are black and bright white, but the foreground color can be changed to any other color of the CGA palette iii.This can be done at runtime without refreshing the screen.

iv.The background color cannot be changed from black on a true IBM CGA card.
v.This mode disables the composite color burst signal by default. vi.The BIOS does not provide an option to turn the color burst on in 640200 mode, and the user must write directly to the mode control register to enable it

160100 16 COLOR MODE

i.Technically, this mode is not a graphics mode, but a tweak of the 8025 text mode ii.The character cell height register is changed to display only two lines per character cell instead of the normal eight lines iii.This quadruples the number of text rows displayed from 25 to 100. These "tightly squeezed" text characters are not full characters. The system only displays their top two lines of pixels (eight each) before moving on to the next row.

Character 221. 221 with blue text and red background color. 221 with red text and blue background color. Character 222.

SPECIAL EFFECTS ON COMPOSITE COLOR

MONITORS
With RGBI monitor COMPOSITE monitor

NTSC composite video, the separation between luminance and chrominance is far from perfect, yielding cross-color artifacts, or color "smearing Programmers soon found out that this flaw could be turned into an asset, as distinct patterns of high-resolution dots would "smear" into consistent areas of solid colors, thus allowing the display of completely new colors. Since these new colors are the result of cross-color artifacting, they are often called "artifact colors".

BUGS AND ERRATA

The higher bandwidth used by 80-column text mode results in random short horizontal lines appearing onscreen (known as "snow") if a program writes directly to video memory, as the CPU has priority when accessing it. This can be avoided by only accessing the memory during the period of vertical or horizontal retrace Another peculiarity of 80-column text mode is that, on composite displays, the picture will be grayscale if the border color is set to black, white, or gray. Setting the border color to brown results in the normal 16 colors being displayed, while other values cause the colors to become tinted. The video controller 6845's row counter being only seven bits wide, display RAM in graphics modes is laid out in a 2:1 INTERLACE" pattern(i.e.) first laying out the data for rows 0, 2, 4, etc., then the data for rows 1, 3, 5, etc., adding additional software overhead for display RAM manipulation

They donot support bit blittters and sprites

INTERLACED AND NON-INTERLACED

Non Interlaced scanning (alternatively referred to as progressive scanning) is a way of displaying, storing, or transmitting moving images in which all the lines of each frame are drawn in sequence

Eg. 1080p at 25 full frames per second

Interlaced video is where only the odd lines, then the even lines of each frame (each image called a video field) are drawn alternately 1080i at 50 half-frames per second=>display at 25Hz

SPRITES AND BIT BLITTERS

SPRITES were a method of integrating unrelated bitmaps so that they appeared to be part of the normal bitmap on a screen. such as creating an animated character that can be moved on a screen without altering the data defining the overall screen. Such sprites can be created by either circuitry or software Bit BLIT (which stands for bit-block [image] transfer but is pronounced bit blit) is a computer graphics operation in which several bitmaps are combined into one

RASTER AND

RASTER OR

ACING THE VDCS

Working integrated circuits became more and more complex The simple Video Display Controllers were slowly replaced by chips that had built-in video processing logic such as Blitters and other logic to manipulate the video RAM contents to do things like drawing lines, filling areas, or drawing fonts Later chips also got special hardware to draw filled triangles to support 3D images, gained hardware Z-buffers and many other methods to accelerate the drawing of 3D pictures Current Video generator chips almost always are Graphics Processing Unit(GPU's) Entry-level PCs today commonly have the video display integrated into the motherboard chipset, which "steals" some system RAM for the display The performance of such a system is not as good as one with dedicated video hardware.

REFERENCES
Http://www.wikipedia.com/Coprocessor.htm Http://www.wikipedia.com/motorola6845.htm Http://www.wikipedia.com/graphics processing.htm Http://www.wikipedia.com/Color graphics processing.htm Embedded systems book by Mathivanan

THANK YOU