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--- blog:retro_z80_mark4 [2019/11/21 15:18] – john
+++ blog:retro_z80_mark4 [2019/11/21 21:42] (current) – [Upgrades - Accelerated Graphics] john
@@ Line 43: / Line 43: @@
 ==== Z180 Mark IV Software ====
-To make the board work, you need at least some level of firmware/rom written to it, otherwise it's just a fancy paperweight.
+In addition to a specific firmware which needs to be programmed into the peripheral controller, to make the Mark IV board work, you need at least some level of firmware/rom written to it, otherwise it's just a fancy paperweight.
    * ROM: [[https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=software:firmwareos:una:start|UNA BIOS]] - by Will Sowerbutts
@@ Line 55: / Line 55: @@
 There are others, but //UNACPM// and //ROMWBW// are the main ones and are [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M|CP/M 2.2]] platforms and actively used and developed by the community. //Fuzix// is a very interesting project, and has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years; a unix-like system for various 8-and-16-bit micro computers.
+----
+==== Upgrades - USB Interface ====
+TBD
+----
+==== Upgrades - Accelerated Graphics ====
+How do you display graphics on a text-mode Z80 based system? Well you don't, without some serious ingenuity or workarounds!
+My idea is to interface to a Raspberry Pi (Zero) and essentially use it as a command-driven GPU accelerator; uploading any needed data to its GPU ram and manipulating that data using calls that are re-mapped to libSDL calls.
+On the Mark IV side we'll need some translation layer that turns (for example) SDL_CreateSurface() or SDL_BlitSurface() calls into simple ASCII strings that can be sent over an interface we can talk to the Pi on (serial? i2c? spi?), then remap them to native Linux SDL functions once they're decoded.
+Work in progress is here: https://github.com/megatron-uk/PyPiGFX
+Main article page yet to be created...