I have an idea that I'm certain someone else must have at least considered if not done already: use an 8051 or variant to drive an old PC video card (an ISA CGA card to display on a TV). A net search has not turned up anything concrete but I'd appreciate anything that could save me some time in setting up the various registers in the card (and these are well documented) as well as the card edge signals that would need to be "fixed" to hard settings to minimize the number of i/o lines needed. Thanks!