I'd be glad to see how the character-related parts of a typical VGA card are made. There were multiple modes, some of them textual, with different fonts, support for the hardware text cursor... not yet video acceleration, but still convenient functions.

I remember working on a project like that in my Digital Design II class. We built a VGA driver to display a chessboard but the real challenge was that we couldn't use a framebuffer, that would have been too easy. We had to build a logic circuit to display the chessboard, a piece on the board (a bitmap), and then use inputs to move the chess piece around. We also used the ARM processor onboard the Cyclone FPGA to run Linux where we wrote a program in C to send board positions to that chessboard logic circuit.

It was kinda hard and I struggled a bit but got it working in the end.

It is delightful how college can push us to explore things we might not ever do left to our own. Despite customizing my major's concentration, I still got a lot of exposure to classes and topics outside my comfort zone. It helped me with a couple crucial pivots and layed the foundation for changing my worldview.

Thanks to all the great professors, TAs, and even uni admins who make the system work (at least when it does work).

It's lamentable that our TVs don't come with VGA inputs or even DVI.

My first "nice" flatscren in 2012 or so had both VGA inputs and a DB9 serial port I could control the TV over!