I'd be glad to see how the character-related parts of a typical VGA card are made. There were multiple modes, some of them textual, with different fonts, support for the hardware text cursor... not yet video acceleration, but still convenient functions.
It is delightful how college can push us to explore things we might not ever do left to our own. Despite customizing my major's concentration, I still got a lot of exposure to classes and topics outside my comfort zone. It helped me with a couple crucial pivots and layed the foundation for changing my worldview.
Thanks to all the great professors, TAs, and even uni admins who make the system work (at least when it does work).
Man, if it weren't for college and pushing outside my major, I wouldn't be nearly as competent in Japanese, and I might not have learned what an arrant douchebag Norman Mailer was, which I did from a professor who loved Mailer! But I have Professor Leeds to thank for teaching me enough about him that I could form my own opinion.
I remember working on a project like that in my Digital Design II class. We built a VGA driver to display a chessboard but the real challenge was that we couldn't use a framebuffer, that would have been too easy. We had to build a logic circuit to display the chessboard, a piece on the board (a bitmap), and then use inputs to move the chess piece around. We also used the ARM processor onboard the Cyclone FPGA to run Linux where we wrote a program in C to send board positions to that chessboard logic circuit.
It was kinda hard and I struggled a bit but got it working in the end.
I did a LabVIEW project to run on an FPGA in a college extracurricular. LabVIEW is capable of taking your serial CPU code and cross-compiling it for FPGA but I wrote mine in actual FPGA style with everything being parallel and impressed everyone with the compile/synthesis speed (still 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes) and low area use. Also people thought it was impressive I could control our SPI peripherals with only two virtual toggle switches... their learned helplessness I suppose, it's a dead simple protocol.
Writing code in everything-parallel style takes a different mindset but you can certainly get used to it. Do not fall victim to the trap of learned helplessness. If you can make something in Logisim-NG then you can program an FPGA.
Unfortunately the standard languages for FPGA are ones derived from simulators that run sequentially on CPUs, so for the most part people are writing sequential imperative code and the compilers are pattern-matching for things that can run in parallel. That's why writing VHDL or Verilog is universally a fairly miserable experience. To make it work, you have to think backwards from the compiler - think of the circuit you want to implement, then how to template-expand it into code the compiler can pattern-match.
You know you're old when posts about college courses include a detailed description of what a CRT was, how they worked, and how much they weighed.
Don't dwell on the weight of obsolete history, it'll only prevent you moving forward. Modern displays are better for most purposes.
It's fine to mourn physical movie media, or vector displays, or PEEK/POKE, because those had good sides, but CRTs in general-purpose raster use have absolutely no advantages. They don't need to be controversial like social media or AI.
It's fine to preserve some in a living or dead museum too.
By the way HDMI or DP protocol is not crazy to implement on an FPGA. It's a very similar idea just with bit-serial digital streams instead of analog. Many FPGAs contain SERDES I/O blocks that can take a 24-bit medium-speed digital signal very similar to the one you feed to your VGA DAC, and convert it to a high-speed bit-serial differential form for transmission to the display.
I wasn't mourning them - though I do miss CRTs and Plasmas for gaming and media consumption.
It was more the author's assumption that the reader wouldn't be familiar with what a CRT is!
It's lamentable that our TVs don't come with VGA inputs or even DVI.
My first "nice" flatscren in 2012 or so had both VGA inputs and a DB9 serial port I could control the TV over!
HDMI accepts DVI signals; all you need is a passive adapter, to connect a DVI-D output to an HDMI input.
Isn't DVI bit-parallel (that's why it has so many pins) while HDMI is serial? Maybe you're thinking of DisplayPort?
Late edit: I was wrong - they're both serial.
No.. it's not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface
Yea I should have been more specific DVI-A is gone.
That said last year I needed HDMI output used a tang nano 9k (£10) and GOWINs free IDE and IP cores were a breeze to use.
The DVI core basically takes what I remember being a VGA signal.
Their HDMI core IIRC just took a framebuffer.
So my complaining is probably in the vein of old many yells at cloud.
DVI's signal is pretty similar to VGA, to the point that it has separate red, green, and blue channels, but instead of analog outputs it has LVDS serial outputs on each channel. It basically replaces each RAMDAC with the serial side of a SERDES.
I don't think the DVI-A connector was ever widely used for analog video input. Devices which supported analog video input almost universally did so using a VGA connector.
The analog pins on the DVI connector were used on many video cards for output, but they were mostly there so that you could use a DVI-to-VGA adapter, not because there were many devices which could use it directly from that pinout.