DementedPurple wrote:
Hey, I plan on building a z80 based game console, but of course, what's a game console without graphics!?
That's called the ColecoVision or the Sega Master System.
Or any of several dozen arcade machines.
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Do people still make 8-bit graphics cards?
Not really, but you can get New-Old-Stock of a bunch of them.
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Would a VIC-II chip from the Commodore 64 work with a z80?
The VIC and VIC-2 require something shaped like the 6502's biphase clock; I don't think the Z80 would play nicely.
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Another question, what's the difference between a 2C02 and a modern graphics card?
2C02 is:
* fixed function
* just-in-time
Modern GPUs are neither.
In the distant past, memory was so expensive that some kind of real-time decompression (like how graphics work on the NES) is required.
However, at some point RAM became cheap enough that it began to make sense to instead provide allow the graphics unit to draw things into a "framebuffer" and just replay the contents of the framebuffer to the display instead.
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How is it able to render 3D polygons?
Math. Matrices, trigonometry, Bresenham's line drawing algorithm, &c.
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Why doesn't a modern graphics card have sprites and palettes to worry about?
Palettes just kinda suck.
You can't interpolate them
You can't mix them
They're a great way of handling real-time decompression, but RAM's too cheap now for it to make any sense.
Sprites have been instead handled via rendering to the framebuffer, and renamed "triangles"