Emulating a smart CRT display unit - ideas?

Hello listmembers, some of you will perhaps remember me being stuck with a problem regarding a Fujitsu FANUC "mate TG" CNC controller (rebadged as "Siemens Sinumerik"), of which I have the main unit but not the monitor. Thanks to a very nice guy living nearby, I was provided with some new information about the interface, which is rather uncommon in itself. I had already guessed that there is a significant amount of smarts in the monitor; the newly acquired documentation confirms this. The silicon brain (CRT controller) of the thing is called LSI HD46505. Integrated with a 12" monochrome CRT display, it features capabilities for a text mode with 64 columns * 24 lines (character size 7*9 dots in an 8*16 character cell), a magnified text mode with 16 columns * 14 lines (21*27 dots in a 32*27 cell) and a b&W bitmapped mode with a resolution of 512*384 dots. Text and graphics can be displayed alone or in combination. The supported character set seems to be a subset of ASCII from 0x20 to 0x5f. Text and raster graphics operations in absolute addressing are controlled by a unidirectional 12 bit parallel interface with strobe (AB0 - AB2, DB0-DB8, WP) in differential signalling, furthermore there are four more differential signals called +HP2, -HP2, +VP2, -VP2 that allow some kind of incremental (relative) graphics cursor positioning by pulse trains. The signalling diagrams indicate a minimum cycle time of 20 us for the parallel interface and 110 us for the counter channels. Does this ring any bells with anyone? Are there similar monitors out there that might be converted with little effort? Otherwise, the registers and instructions are described in enough detail so that making a replacement or some sort of emulation at least seems possible. What sort of hard- and/or software would one be looking at to accomplish this? I have some hazy memory of seeing a demonstration of a Pong game programmed in LabView(!) running on an FPGA based device which would directly generate VGA output, but that was a very expensive unit. For now I'm just looking for a cheap and simple way to give me some idea of what, if anything, the controller is trying to display. As I think the data will be coming in bursts (only e.g. when a new screen mask is displayed), a microcontroller with a suitable amount of buffer memory might be sufficient to translate the interface signals into serial data and send them to a PC, which would then generate and display the image. Thanks for your input, yours sincerely Arno Kletzander -- GRATIS f?r alle GMX-Mitglieder: Die maxdome Movie-FLAT! Jetzt freischalten unter http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/maxdome01