F18A VGA Video Upgrade PCB

The F18A board itself - the FPGA card that replaces the ColecoVision's TMS9918A video chip and brings VGA out of a machine built for a television.

Why it matters

• The output is generated digitally and sent straight to a modern display, so nothing is lost to modulation and demodulation on the way.
• Sprite flicker disappears. The original chip shows four sprites on a scanline and drops the rest, which is why so many games of the era blink.
• It is pin-compatible with the original, so it sits in the same socket rather than needing the board rewired.

The same chip serves the TI-99/4A, MSX1, SpectraVideo and Tomy Tutor machines, so one design covers a whole generation of hardware. The HDL is published on GitHub.