> -----Original Message-----
> Jim,
> yah, I think we will find things that can be improved. for a next board
> spin (I only ordered 30 boards initially) I can add a track/ jumper.
> nice idea to "power" the DB25 port also!
I've actually been meaning to do this for quite a while, to power my Bluetooth
serial adapter, but never got around to it. Sadly, it seems the Bluetooth
adapter draws too much power - I don't know if a freshly-recapped motherboard
would be able to power it or not, but the machine I put these jumpers in only
has a new memory battery - the first board I recapped is the one with the bad
VEE supply that I'm still trying to fix. In any case, the modified serial port
will power the MVT100 just fine, but my Bluetooth adapter drags VDD down quite
a bit, the display dims, the machine starts rebooting (I'm guessing the power
supply shuts down and then restarts itself?) so I will have to put this idea
aside for the future to see if a recapped motherboard can handle the load.
> The issue of how the fonts look is a bit beyond my pay grade for
> now. What is implemented is exactly what was done in the original
> design.
> [...]
> The font has grown on me ;)
Yeah, I realize the issue, and please don't think I'm complaining to you about
the way the font scales :) - to fix it properly would require something much
beefier than a PIC and a whole lot more coding because you'd have to be able to
output different resolutions to match the native resolution of the attached
monitor, and you'd have to scale the font to the output resolution. (I suppose
it would be easier to support a limited set of output resolutions and store
individually scaled bitmapped fonts for each of those resolutions... still a
heck of a lot of work, and it won't fix it for every monitor.)
Of course, at that point it's easier to take the sledgehammer approach - build
a Pi image that just boots up and displays an 80x24 console terminal running
'screen /dev/ttyS0' to the HDMI output ;)
jim
