LCD pads on mainboard

Hey guys... after opening the empeg and having bad luck... I noticed some little pads next to the CPU labeled LCD. I guess this is directed towards the developers of the empeg.. What do these pads do? Is this an abandoned idea for having an external LCD display? I'd take a picture of the pads but my player is on its way to Eutronix.

I tried to search for this first, on the FAQ and this board and saw nothing about it. Very surprising.. Unless my searching skills suck.

This is from an Mk2 board. LCD headers visible right under where the CPU would be.

AH! Thanks Rob. Since I had a hard time playing wheres waldo, i'm going to attach the picture with the pads illustrated. Anyone have any ideas?

Yes.

pca

.heh.

aw, c'mon... something?

I believe the "Yes" was in responding to "Is this an abandoned idea for having an external LCD display?".

We talked about it a tiny bit this summer in Amersfoort this summer.

John

oh.. ok. So these pads have been abandoned and they serve no purpose at all?

They're the signals for a TFT panel; however, there are only 8 of them (the other 8 are GPIOs 2-9, which are very much in use). If you disabled the display, you could in theory drive an 8-bit active display - or even a TV out, using something like the Chrontel CH7003. ISTR there's LCD0-7, PCLK, LCLK and FCLK.

Another thing you could do is use bits 1-3 of the video data (the VFD only uses one in every 4 pixels from the video controller) and easily hook up another 3 displays that could show different things

Hugo

Another thing you could do is use bits 1-3 of the video data (the VFD only uses one in every 4 pixels from the video controller) and easily hook up another 3 displays that could show different things

Easily is relative, if I tried surface mount soldering I'd probably have a brick, but that would be cool. Imagine one display for gpsapp, one for whatever the next cool hack is, and one for the player visualizations. Seems like overkill to move the lyrics away from the player visualization but you could do that too.

COOL! Well, I guess that answers my question. Too bad I don't understand much of it. Thanks