This was the VGA standard. It was not built on a CRT controller; instead, the heart of the VGA chipset was a custom ASIC, a crystal, a bit of video RAM, and a digital to analog converter.

Feeling nostalgic we presume, [Glen Kleinschmidt] set out to build a 640x480x64 VGA controller card from discrete logic chips. If we ignore the 512Kx8 Cypress SRAM video memory, he succeeds ...