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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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18 years ago

Implementing VGA display in Nios II Project

Hey everyone,

I am trying to find a good place to start to display images on a VGA monitor from my DE1 Altera board with a Cyclone II processor. Does anyone know of any good reference design projects or documentation for doing this or where to get started? Have an SOPC system built and programmed with a VGA controller included. All prep work is done I am at the point where I am ready to get into code in Nios II.

Also, as another question does anyone know how to load a bitmap into SRAM because I am under the assumption that once loaded into SRAM I can display to the monitor and that whatever I want to be displayed must reside in the SRAM. Is this a fair assumption?

Thanks a lot!

1 Reply

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    18 years ago

    Sure... Here's a quick Perl script that reads your bitmap image and creates a C char array from it:

    ===== 

    #!/bin/env perl
$file = $ARGV;
open(INPUT, "$file") || die "Failed to open input file!!!  Cannot convert!!!";
open(OUTPUT, "> ext_flash.h" );
# #  Output the variable declaration and set an attribute on it.# 
print(OUTPUT "unsigned char __attribute__ ((aligned(4))) data_buf = {\n");
$i = 0;
while(read(INPUT, $data, 1))
{
  if($i == 0)
    {
      print(OUTPUT "\t");
    }
 # 
 #  Here's the magic...  use unpack to grab the file's data into an unsigned
 #  char variable.
 # 
  printf(OUTPUT "%#02x, ", unpack("C", $data));
  $i++;
  if($i == 10)
    {
      print(OUTPUT "\n");
      $i = 0;
    }
}
print(OUTPUT "};\n\n");
close(FILE);

    =====

    You could do this is most any language.... modify at will.

    Cheers,

    - slacker