Hello.
I've been programming microcontrollers for 3 years already and I'm thinking about buying an ARM-based microcontroller which is the one with the development board Arduino Zero.
I've been thinking about making a "pseudo-graphics card" such as Gameduino, but for Gamebuino and a PAL/NTSC TV. According to my plan, Gamebuino will talk to it via I2C. What it should do is receive bytes of bitmaps, tile layout, sprite layout, scroll setup and other info about the picture and store them via a DMA channel into a frame buffer while another DMA channel writes bytes to the DAC which is connected to the RCA cable that goes to the TV.
I'm planning to make it have 16 colors which are those of PICO-8 because that pallette looks amazing. Now, there's a problem. I don't know how color is rendered and what kind of signal I should send to the TV in order to draw pixels on it. I don't know what's the frequency that the DMA should be set to and if it's even settable. I don't know what are common resolutions for TVs and how all that works.
I've been looking into the TVout library for Arduino UNO, but that's only for black and white. I don't know how to get some color on the TV. The framebuffer isn't an issue because my program will dynamically render scanlines into a scanline buffer while the DMA will send them to the TV while the CPU renders the next one. If I'm not clear, basically, it's a tile-based graphics engine such as the one of the NES/SNES/GameBoy/Genesis.
Does anyone know how to render PAL/NTSC picture by using this microcontroller? Has anyone tried?