Just as proof of concept, I up-ported the LCD-interface from the ‘beatrix’ SoC to the ‘dagobert’ netpp node default SoC configuration. This also introduces GPIO multiplexing options on port A, meaning, that a few pins have dedicated funcionality driven by an asynchronous bus engine with some extra decompression logic, tailored specifically for LCD screens. Since direct GPIO bit banging would burn a few more cycles and be slow, having a special interface definitely pays off (apart from DMA features, etc.)
The display controller of this OpenSmart variant has different addressing modes, so you can switch between landscape and portrait. However, there’s a catch: When trying to make use of the built-in scrolling feature, it turns out it is only supported for portrait mode, i.e. the shown landscape orientation would require to buffer the terminal content and redraw for each new line.
I have also tried to run a simple GUI toolkit as Achim Döblers µGUI. Due to its simple pixel-wise drawing API it is not very fast, but works ok for most purposes.
What is left to do is the touch screen implementation. This will only work on the ADC10 variant of the netpp node with populated msp430g2553. For now, touch screen is not required, so this task is not scheduled (no pun intended).
Other than that, the same techniques as mentioned in this post are used to save RAM resources using the SCACHE peripheral.