How do you handle them latching the wrong way and letting out the magic smoke? Built into the chips?

Congrats on getting something that functions, despite the glitches, which are probably due to crosstalk and other noise over the rat's nest wiring.

Nice to see support for Standard Galactic Alphabet.

Great work. I miss the speed we had before graphics card were a thing. Everything was literally 100x faster to render. I wish we could bypass graphics card entirely on modern Oses and computers but it looks like it’s not even possible anymore with EUFI. I would buy a card that works for TUI only, and with a large set of Unicode chars, and works on a 6K screen.

Two notes for the creator:

1) The CD4000 series is about the slowest logic family that's still on the market. Switching to anything else - 74LS, 74HC, take your pick - will improve your fMax dramatically.

2) Every IC on your board needs a decoupling capacitor as close to its power/ground pins as possible. Not having those is probably causing a lot of weird behavior, including the "interference" you're seeing from other devices.

De. Cou. Pling. Caps!

The number of issues you'll face that you'll NEVER be able to explain without them is ... not small...

Really cool project, takes me back to the days browsing through Elektor home projects.

Brilliant! I think all the minor glitches give it character. A perfectly clean text output would be boring, but this looks really cool.

Perfect to play Nethack/Slashem :D :

https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii.html

50x18 chars... well, I've seen a patched Nethack for the Zipit Z2 (altough you can perfectly set a micro-font being able to fit a whole standard 80x24/25 char screen).

This is very cool! I like the idea of a real text-mode card for a homebuilt PC versus the more framebuffer-like card that Ben designed. Nice work. I also like the natural progression from text to Pikachu. :D