Text on Screen using FPGA

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yttuncel

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Hello,

My question is about finding the most suitable method to print text on DVI monitor using an Altera Cyclone 3 FPGA. In fact I am already doing this but I am not at all satisfied. I read the posts by echo47 and they are parallel to what I am using in my design right now.

I hold rasterized font data in a ROM where I myself generated the .mif file. I constructed this .mif file via matlab. First I installed a freeware "font rasterizer". What it did is to create 16x16 monochromatic bitmap images of characters. Then I read these images with matlab and stored them as vectors and then formed .mif file with some manipulation and stuff. If this part is not clear I will go into more detail.

Currently I am receiving my input as 7 bit per character, not form keyboard but from an external mcu ( SPI master). From these inputs I generate ROM addresses of the characters and feed it to ROM and obtain the pixel data at the output. Then I store these ROM outputs in a small canvas (RAM) and a controller copies the contents of this canvas to the actual frame buffer.

Is there a better alternative than my approach you guys could think of? Or can anybody provide me a method to obtain proper ROM data ( text data)? My data is not pixel perfect as the tool I used to create bmp images relied on user input to fit the image to 16x16 bit map. Also I did not understand how to exract character data from BIOS, so I may use a tutorial for such method for a 64bit Windows system.

Thanks
 

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