IF Only We Had More Time...

            Although the outcome of this project was very exciting and satisfying, it would have been nice to try a few more things. Besides fixing the bugs in our code/project, a color picture would be the ultimate goal. Carlo and Keith have proven that it is possible, with some external hardware.

            Finding a way to cram more resolution from the Mega163's puny 1024 byte memory would prove very useful. Our theoretical maximum resolution (with no memory limitations) would have been 138 x 255. 138 horizontally because each pixel can be outputted every 3 machine cycles. This would require just over 35k of memory just for the screen buffer. Anyone who has ever programmed graphics in Apple II BASIC would realize the limitations when your pixels are so large. If we had considered this project sooner, maybe we could have found a way to communicate to external RAM or FLASH.

            Other games that would be easily adaptable to this format of TV display would include pong and would be much cooler than on the oscilloscope (just kidding Bala and Levy).

Closing Remarks

            The only thing we would have really done differently would have been to not have burned a week and a half on LCD Air Hockey, like we did.  Given that extra time we may have been able to implement the above features and/or fix some of the small bugs we had.

    Much thanks to our professor, Bruce Land, who explained the whole NTSC scheme to us the first time, and for letting us use his Jensen black and white TV for testing and our demo, as well as for making a nice composite video cord that we could hook up to a breadboard quite nicely.