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If you're generating a PAL/NTSC/composite signal it's pretty intuitive to think of lighting up point X as turning on the signal (and this the electron gun) at a specific time because that's the way the "protocol" works. There's only one "wire" and the data is purely serial and synchronized to a specific scan speed.

This is also how the video hardware on CPU based consoles and home computers worked. They had counters and used them to either index into a frame buffer or look up hardware sprites, or both. Some machines did it more or less entirely in software (e.g. the ZX-80).

http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2023/10/how-the-zx80-gen...

Of course there are modern programmers who still do this today, bit-banging VGA on little microcontrollers and the like.



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