Craig Steiner wrote:
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On the other hand, even PC systems don't use a Pentium to drive the video. They use a video system that was designed for the purpose of driving the video.

There's a special C compiler that creates programs to be run in the gfx card processor of modern cards. It's really bad at floating point math and can barely handle system calls and file I/O (everything "emulated") but with logic and fixed point maths, speedwise it was compared to like Pentium 4 running at 10GHZ.
So, PCs don't use Pentiums to drive gfx, simply because pentiums are far behind the specs of the gfx card chipsets :)

I'd be strongly against a fixed gfx chip. Either an FPGA (cost!) or a fast dedicated '51...

Yes, I'd like to see the computer below $50 plus PCB...

As my experience with video is zero (other than having read the informative links posted by Prahlad) it's still not clear to me how much circuitry we'd need if we want to use video-specific parts. For example, if we want to have the system use VGA how much supporting circuitry would be necessary and how easy would it be to obtain the parts?

We can always use a standard ISA VGA :)
But I think we'd need just some analog circuitry besides the '51 to convert 8-bit into video levels.
I'd be perfectly happy with monochrome grayscale display, though 1-bit b/w would be acceptable too. (I think "native 51" v1 should be 1-bit, the 6502-emulator v2 should be either mono or color, depending on what we learn from the 1-bit...

Yet another reason against LCD...

> We may wish to consider the possibility of emulation in the design to facilitate it later on, but I think if we make 6502 emulation part of the project initially it will never get done.

Right - for now we can loosely follow "general Atari guidelines". If we get that going, we'll think of exact emulation :)