Hey Everyone,

I just finished my video card and I thought I'd share some stuff I learned along the way.

1. I don't have a fancy awesome function generator that can output a set number of pulses so to confirm I had my 8-input NAND gates connected properly I connected the NAND gate output to the counter enable (pin 10 on the first 74161) and let the clock run. When the NAND gate output went low, it would disable the counter and I was able to confirm the output of the counters with a volt meter.
2. 10 MHz is pushing the limit of a breadboard so expect the oscillator output to look kinda bad and keep wires short as possible.
3. I don't have Photoshop so I used GIMP but honestly my knowledge of even that is pretty limited so I'll outline my (probably way harder than it needs to be) method for anyone else in the same position:

• I created the custom 64 color palette by going to Windows -> Dockable Dialogs --> Palettes
• Click New Palette and name it
• Open up the color selection from the toolbox
• Pause Ben's video at the point where he shows the paper with all the hex values for the colors
• Enter the hex values into the box that says HTML Notation and the box that says Current Color should be updated. You can drag those colors 1-by-1 into the new Palette window.
• I then cropped and scaled my image and canvas size to 100x75.
• converted the image to indexed by Image --> Mode --> Indexed
• A dialog box called Convert Image to Indexed Colors will pop up
• Click Use Custom Palette and select your created palette. The image colors should update.

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In Ben's video he saved the file as a PNG and used a python script to strip the header, extract the raw pixel data, and pad trailing zeros. I don't have any python experience so I did it all in GIMP.

The first goal to tackle is the trailing zeros. Ben used the script to add trailing zeros which basically makes an image size of 128x75 pixels. This is the same as manually adding a black 28x75 rectangle to the right of the image. The other goal is to obtain the raw pixel data and this can be done by exporting the image as a RAW image. My steps were:

• Change canvas size to 128x75 which creates that blank space to the right of the image (Will appear as transparent).
• The raw image data can be obtained by exporting the image as a RAW (.data) file. The problem is the image will also be exported with the Alpha channel which will double the file size by adding white pixels in between each pixel. I tried to fix this by removing the alpha channel but It didn't seem to work so my work around was to export the image as a .bmp which removes the alpha channel and makes any blank canvas space black (Which is perfect since the blank canvas space will become the black rectangle)
• Now open a new GIMP window and re-upload the new .bmp. Now export that image as a RAW (.data) image. The file size should be 9,600 Bytes.

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I confirmed the file looked correct by opening it in the browser based Hex editior Hexed.it .

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Hope this can help others out!