Arduino TV out

In 2013 I bought an Arduino Uno after I got inspired from this project, TV-out, that enabled an Arduino to connect to a TV set and display text and graphics. I also looked at this project, Pac-man, were Allen Huffman created a Pac-man game for this TV-out module.

Normally when you develop program, you write short stubs to test the code. You can also write code to "replace" expensive hardware or hardware that you do not have, in order to test the code. In this particular case I was interested in writing/testing code written on my laptop, and when the program was ready to some extent, test it by connecting a real TV. In this way I can sit in my office at home and write code, while the rest of my family is watching the TV.

The stub that I created is a sort of emulator to project the TVout graphics in a window under Microsoft Windows 7 environment. In this way I could develop programs on my PC and test the TV-out functionality inside Microsoft Windows 7 OS. When all is done I could include the real TV-out module and compile the program for “release” and connect the Arduino to a TV screen. I have created a TVout library that uses Borland Graphics Interface, to display the output in a window in a Microsoft Windows 7 environment.

As a development tool you can use DevCpp and my lib together with Allen Huffman's source files.

In order to compile the program from source with Devcpp, you need BGI (Borland Graphics Interface)

from University Of Colorado.

You also need to set “Disable Desktop Composition” for the file c:\DevCpp\devcpp.exe.

You can download my lib here: devcppproj_v0.22 pacman1.zip

The files of interest, that I created, are: TVoutemul.cpp and TVoutemul.h