Creating a Display Timing Circuit — Part 5 of a Series

In the last installment of this series about creating my own handheld console I’ve shown my version of a Gameboy emulator running on a Teensy 4 with a 2.4 inch Arduino display module attached to it. For the final build I intend to use a 4 inch display. For this I’ll need to write my own drivers as well as come up with some supporting circuitry. This blog post including a video will cover the timing circuit required to drive the display.

Driving the display ultimately requires three different components to work together: the timing circuit, the video RAM, as well as a controller connected to the serial peripheral interface of the display.

You can learn all about the creation of the timing circuit in the following video:

See the schematic below for a more detailed look into the circuit discussed in the video:

Circuit used to generate the timing signals for the display

Next up will be the creation of video RAM to put graphics onto the display in real-time.

The Series so Far

Part 1 — Building a Gameboy From Scratch
Part 2 — The CPU
Part 3 — Memory and Memory-Mapped I/O
Part 4 — Running Tetris
This — Display Timing Circuit
Part 6 — Behold the Breadboard Gameboy

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or would like to know more about the project, feel free to leave a comment or contact me on Instagram or Twitter!