If logic ICs don’t appeal, maybe he’d be interested in relay logic? There’s something super satisfying about a totally electromechanical contraption clunking away and ‘thinking’.
Counter, decoder, resistor ladder, op-amp per color channel and you have component video. I am not sure how I could generate the timing info. I suppose there is much higher freq parts, one could do direct digital synthesis.
because that kind of system competes with Raspberry Pi which puts a lot of downward pressure on what is an "acceptable" price.
Real 8-bitters used custom chips for their display controllers, but if you don't use custom chips you need a few handfuls of logic chips and you wind up with something about as expensive as the video card linked to above. To justify a custom chip you need big volume. You can make a display controller from an FPGA or Microcontroller, it's probably cheaper than one made from small chips, but still not cheap enough... And there's something absurd about using a much more powerful part than the CPU to run the display.
