On Tue, 28 Nov 1995, Paul Christenson [N3EOP] wrote:

> Is the PIC fast enough to be useable as a character generator to overlay
> text/graphics on NTSC video?  About 10 chars/line is all I need; nothing
> fancy.  (I want to overlay date/time on a camera feed.)
>

Outputting the text vertically rather than horizontally makes the timing
much easier - you get a minimum of the line scan time (64 us for PAL,
don't know about NTSC) to generate each line of each of your characters,
which should be trivial for any PIC.  All you have to do then is clock out
the bit pattern at the correct rate;  this can be done with a parallel to
serial shift register if you want to go really fast (i.e. narrow
characters).

Ben Heller (B.Heller@Sheffield.AC.UK)