Imagesource: https://archive.org/

If you tinker with your own hardware, sooner or later you can't avoid the question of how to produce multicolored pixels in an organized fashion on a CRT display just with the help of a few digital circuits.

A problem, which was already solved at the beginning of the 80s, and to which some manufacturers dedicated themselves in very much detail. Accordingly, a good number of chips were and still are to be found, which do exactly the work of driving a CRT, but bring along some complexity themselves.

Gerry Kane has published a fantastic book about those, and he did that back in 1980 already. The CRT Controller Handbook covers 5 different chips from NS, Intel, Motorola, Synertek and TI, some of which are still available today.

Besides these the book also introduces the reader to the basic functionality of CRT displays, and is an excellent foundation, even if you plan to look into VGA or HDMI afterwards.

Thanks archive.org! 🤩