68k homebuilts

One ASIC, the first one I ever designed, was what LSI logic called a "structured array". It contained a 2KB RAM and about 5K usable gates. This part would be programmed with the x,w,w,h of some putative location of a character image on the 1 bpp frame buffer. It would fetch the bitmap and turn it into a normalized MxN gray scale image, although 5x7 was always what was used. Added as an afterthought, because I had a few hundred unused gates, I added the ability to rotate a 32x32 block of image. The 68020 would write 32 words to registers on the chip (really, it went into that 2KB RAM), then it would read them back out at a different address and get them rotated. By stepping through the image in the right order, you could rotate the entire image. It was considerably faster than having the 68020 do the rotation in software.