Advanced VGA On A UP2: Introduction

Project Info
Author: Chris
Difficulty: Medium
Time Invested: 4 Hours

Prerequisites:
Take a look at the above
tutorials before continuing
to read this tutorial.
           We previously looked at VHDL VGA and saw the timing necessities for creating the signals. The VHDL code turned out to be rather simple and it flowed with nanosecond accuracy. The code allowed us to change things at the pixel level which is a very powerful tool, however things can get very complicated very quickly.
           The Advanced VGA topics that will be discussed in this tutorial move beyond the traditional method of setting pixels and onto another method where the screen is split into larger sections. These larger sections will output premade bitmaps onto the screen. These bitmaps can contain whatever you set them to be.

The UP-2 Board

The Byteblaster MV

Purpose & Overview of this project
           For this project/tutorial we want to generate characters on the screen using a character generating rom. We will use a seperate entity for the character rom & vga signals. A third VHDL entity will be created to use both those entities and to display some fun stuff. We'll make a 'bouncing ball' fly around the screen with some static text to prove the program works.



;