remote display server #75
Description
For quite some time I've been thinking about how to connect old computers to modern displays. There are various converters that can be used to get HDMI output but they're expensive and quite often doesn't work very well. A further problem is that HDMI is a highly proprietary technology which makes custom hardware difficult to maintain.
However many modern displays has Ethernet and/or Wifi with the ability to run apps. One example of this is Chromecast that are frequently used to make TV's into remote displays. However Chromecast works best with devices that can encode and stream video. This wouldn't work for my C128.
Do the idea now is to create a new protocol. I will start with the ability to display text as it's a requirement for many applications. To do this the plan is to design a very simple protocol that will work well over RS232 connections while also requiring a minimal amount of memory.
This means that graphics processing will as much as possible be pushed to happening server side and take advantage of Smart TV GPU:s. The side effects of this is of course that any applications that expect to use any of the two graphics processors in my C128 will not work. For software that I written this a no issue as I will instead benefit from full 80 column text output in and more. Text will most likely look a lot better when rendered on the TV and not upscaled in a an analog to HDMI converter.
The initial server development will probably target a standard laptop because thats easy for running and debugging code.
Milestone 1 will be to have an UDP client and an UDP server running on the same laptop. One option here is to implement a CromeCast backend on the server making it a proxy for the protocol that all of my displays already support.
Milestone 2 will be to get this running with emulators, particularly those that have networking and/or serial port support.
Milestone 3 is where I see FujiNet becoming part of it. I want to netboot my C128 into a NOS with remote display support. I noticed that FujiNet already has a NOS project so I will start by studying it. Although the Atari probably boots in a way from the C128 or the C64 I think that porting this NOS and extending it for my purposes is the way to go. Obviously integrating my protocol into this NOS will be of importance because I don't intend having a screen connected the old way.
Milestone 4. Port/write applications.
Also I have some plans regarding building a home computer with an embedded CPU such as Raspberry Pi Pico where this will come in handy. This is also a project where connecting displays bothered me and where a remote display makes everything a lot easier. I know that the RPi pico does VGA but that's still something that doesn't work well with modern displays so using a RS232 port is a much better option as there are plenty of RS232 ports in most embedded ARM processors. Some of the embedded RS232 ports can go up to 2Mbit which is more than enough.