An unconventional idea. The video standard timings are generated by the firmware in IC7. There is 2K of write-only video RAM in IC8 and a font ROM in IC9. There were two versions written. 16 lines × 48 characters with graphics, and 20 lines × 80 characters with inverse video.
These video controller boards provide a low-cost means of displaying video on STEbus systems. Two versions are available: the SVA which provides a 16-line × 48-character display, or the SVB which offers 20 lines × 80 characters.
SVA comes with 128 ASCII characters and 128 graphics symbols suitable for industrial displays; these include lines, pipes, junctions, bar graph or histogram characters and even a man with a spanner.
SVB is designed for information processing applications and offers an inverse video character set in addition to standard ASCII. Characters are stored in EPROM. allowing you to define your own 256-character set on an 8 × 16 matrix. The board’s fast 2910 bit-slice controller provides a completely flicker-free display; 2k of screen memory is included.
Both video output and composite video and sync outputs are provided. We can also supply 5-inch monitors (which fit into a 3U rack, including a version with a touchscreen interface.
STEbus:
The board implements a write-only slave interface to the bus. It can be memory-mapped into any 4k segment of the bus memory space.