I have a minimally functional ESP32 Arduino display library that lets sketches use the color composite video signal generator of ESP_8_BIT to send their own graphics to an old-school tube TV. However, all I have as an interface is a pointer into the frame buffer. This is fine when we just need a frame buffer to hand to something like a video game console emulator, but that's a bit too raw to use directly.

I need to put a more developer-friendly graphics library on top of this frame buffer, and I have a few precedents in mind. It needs to be at least as functional as the existing TVout Arduino library, which only handles monochrome but does offer a minimally functional graphics API. My prime candidate for my purpose is the Adafruit GFX Library. That is the target which contenders must exceed.

I'm willing to have an open mind about this, so I decided to start with the most basic query of "ESP32 graphics library" which pointed me to FabGL. That homepage loaded up with a list of auto-playing videos that blasted a cacophony of overlapping sound as they all started playing simultaneously. This made a terrible first impression for no technical fault of the API itself.

After I muted the tab and started reading, I saw the feature set wasn't bad. Built specifically for the ESP32, FabGL offers some basic user interface controls, a set of drawing primitives, even a side menu of audio and input device support. On the display side (the reason I'm here) it supports multiple common display driver ICs that usually come attached to a small LCD or OLED screen. In the analog world (also the reason I'm here) it supports color VGA output though not at super high color depths.

But when I started looking for ways to adapt it to some other display mechanism, like mine, I came up empty handed. If there is provision to expose FabGL functionality on a novel new display like ESP_8_BIT color composite video generator, I couldn't find it in the documentation. So I'll cross FabGL off my list for that reason (not just because of those auto-playing videos) and look at something else that has well-documented ways to work on an external frame buffer.