I am in favour of using a dedicated chip for VGA video output in such a system. I can't understand your persistence for a "complete" 8052 based system the way you mean it... I thought that when we say that a system is 8052, Z80, Pentium or whatever based is about its central CPU and not about every single chip of it... I think that in the past I had seen FPGA designs that could drive VGA displays (think that were application notes from Xilinx and/or some design(s) in http://www.opencores.org , but maybe I am wrong...).

Another thing is about sound: An easy solution for such a system would be an mp3 decoder with integrated DAC and/or headphone amplifier. In my opinion the best solution is VS1011 and VS1002 from VLSI (http://www.vlsi.fi/). These chips are the only mp3 decoders I have seen that can hanlde PCM and WAV type of files (VS1002 can handle also ADPCM encoding/decoding so you can have among the others a voice recorder...), plus you can develop an mp3 player program such as Winamp (We all know how widespread are the mp3 files. The bad thing is that an 8052 is too "weak" to decode them...). On the other hand you can use an AC '97 codec, but more CPU power is needed in this case plus more software (drivers).

Of course you can add other features such as USB, Ethernet, etc, etc...

George

P.S. When I was at the last 2 years of the elementary school and until the first 3 years of the high school I had an Amstrad CPC 6128 with the color monitor and not the ugly green one. What a great machine! Still remember the classic "fights" in my school between those that had Amiga 500 and those that had Atari ST. I belonged in the minority ;) (Amstrad those years was in the last days of its glory...). Unfortunately I sold it... :(