VIC-II KAWARI on c0pperdragon's RGB Vid Mod: does not work

[distantvoices]

Hello,

Recently I've managed to get my hands on a few of c0pperdragon's RGB Vid Mods. C0pperdragon's RGB vid mod sniffs the signals off of the VIC-II-Pins, in short, and renders the received data to an image - which is quite snazzy if I may be so bold to say. The one and only caveat is, that VIC-II KAWARI and the RGB Vid Mod aren't compatible enough for the RGB Vid Mod to read workable Data.

So, with an off-the-shelf-VIC-II, the RGB Vid Mod works quite nice and seamless. With a KAWARI, I get the blue border and over large parts of the screen blocky, flickering colors. On the sixtyclone based on assy 250466 as well as the one based on assy 250469 rev B it displayed the boxy, blocky distortion. In addition, it displayed parts of the basic boot up text (and the blinking cursor) in all the wrong colors with flickering and dancing colors.

Test performed with small Kawari as well as large Kawari with the latest DVI Firmware. (1.17 IIRC). On sixtyclone 250466 I've installed the vanilla PLA from 1986 to eliminate timing issues probably inherent to modern PLA solutions.

Image below shows the working config with a vanilla VIC-II. Works as expected.

This image shows the config resulting in a display weird and flickering.

Below please check out the board I've performed this test on. The thing works - buildt it with my own hands and performed both dead test and diagnosis with harness.

What - apart from simply not configuring a c64 this way - can we do? I do own both a stash of KAWARIs and a few C64 boards equipped with c0pperdragon's RGB vid mod. I can read VHDL well enough but I'm not experienced enough with it to troubleshoot that problem. Would be quite fine if KAWARI and c0pperdragon's solution could work together so I can build C64 with multiple connectivity options.

Thanks a bunch for even reading this lengthy post.

[ikrananka]

I would like to add a +1 to this request. I have a C64 modded with c0pperdragon's RGB Vid Mod but the PAL VIC-II I have in that machine is failing. So, I bought a VIC-II KAWARI with the intention of installing it in the RGB modded C64 to replace the failing VIC-II. So, I'm very disappointed to hear that this currently doesn't work and would also love to see a solution be developed if it can.

[randyrossi]

It doesn't surprise me this doesn't work. I imagine C0pperdragon's board was finely tuned to the original VIC's address/data bus timing and other control signals. The Kawari doesn't match timing down to that level. I think it would be easier for the c0pperdragon board to adjust to Kawari's timing rather than trying to get Kawari to play with the existing expectations. But I would not ask the creator to go through the trouble. I am working on a luma code encoding that the rgb2hdmi hat supports, however. Do you know if that video module supports lumacode? It seems to me to be a much easier solution to have video output through that board. From what I understand, that board is essentially emulating a VIC-II in sync with what it thinks a real VIC-II chip is doing. So now you have an emulated VIC-II trying to match another emulated VIC-II. It would be much easier just to have the Kawari output lumacode encoding over the luma pin and have the board interpret that and then output the new video signal. Issue #1 was opened by c0pperdragon for lumacode and I am working on it now. I will ask if this is a feature that can be added to that board.

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On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 6:21 PM ikrananka ***@***.***> wrote: I would like to add a +1 to this request. I have a C64 modded with c0pperdragon's RGB Vid Mod but the PAL VIC-II I have in that machine is failing. So, I bought a VIC-II KAWARI with the intention of installing it in the RGB modded C64 to replace the failing VIC-II. So, I'm very disappointed to hear that this currently doesn't work and would also love to see a solution be developed if it can. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#25 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAI3HKCFXVAQEI5VV23ORP3YBQXXXAVCNFSM6AAAAAA6TKKAASVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTOOBTGU3TCOBTGA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

-- Randy Rossi - "There are only two things that are hard about computer science; Naming things, Cache Invalidation, and Off-by-one errors."