40-Column boards for the VIC-20

[RichCini]

All --

I've been working on a few VIC-20 projects recently (https://github.com/RichCini) and recently I came across a 40-column cartridge from Data20 (the Display Manager cartridge) that I thought would be good to reproduce. A fellow list member is going to send me some pictures and try to dump the ROMs. But, before I embarked on this, I wanted to see if anyone knew of any existing similar projects that I can use in reconstructing this board.

Thanks!
Rich

 

[Kakemoms]

I did make an expander a few years back with a video output (in VGA though) for the Vic-20. it basically gave you the same 20(23) column screen as the VIC chip, but on a VGA screen. Everything was in Verilog code and output from a FPGA. It wasn’t compatible with the Data20, but tweaking it to do 40 column would have been fairly trivial (being VGA). Using a FPGA to do it was probably a good idea, but it brought the price up too much. If you want to do something like that, try to keep the price down. And try to find fpga’s or cpld’s that doesn’t require 0.4mm solder pitch… (which seems trivial but is actually not so easy given the current chip crunch). A breakout board may be a quicker and cheaper solution for a short run (<100 boards).