so my sit back and relax attitude towards this project, after nearly burning myself out on the led matrix project, has provided a interesting side effect
although YES i am having quite a "fun time" even with timing out monochrome qvga to something the arduino can "sync" with, fooling around I managed to create an odd pixel clock that works OK with text on a overlay to a 640x480 vga signal, and would be usable for a RS170 with a pixel clock that allows 100 pixels per line ( * undetermined x computer generated lines)
in theory :-/
the idea is a 25.175mhz clock dumps into a f /16 divider made out of 2 74x74 dual d type flip flops, which is providing a 1.9MHz clock
or 0.515 microseconds per clock cycle, RS170's active video time is 51.5 microseconds giving 100pixels per line
this is pushing the arduino quite hard, giving data look up, counting, and sync but I have some cards up my sleeve, including "dual mcu" willingness IF necessary, and a brand new old stock from a radio shack that is a throwback from 1987 (god bless you!), 4164, 64Kbit (8kbyte) dynamic ram chip
the ram is important for me to learn considering I am doing a 100% restore on my 1985 Apple //c (rom2) and the thing has 128KB of it, along with its pretty easy to upgrade in the future outside of my nostalgia as parallel ram has not changed much
Why all this trouble?
cause I want to learn more hardware!
if I wanted crap on a screen I have a pic32 that can do 640x480 monochrome in software no problem
even all the division and counting done by the logic chips and somewhat by the arduino could be done in maybe even a gal setup, which I have a tube of and a prom burner!
but I want to do it at the lowest level I can handle at this point for experience sake 
using tools that we all have access to, for if nothing else, learning