ASCII to Video Out?!

Any Apple II series can do just that. Input "ascii" via the keyboard, and the characters are displayed on the composite video output, which can be displayed through a VCR.

Are you talking about doing video overlay, where you can overlay text on top of an existing video stream? You're going to have to describe what you are looking for in more detail. Maybe a better question to ask is: Ultimately, what are you wanting to do?

If you're looking for at circuit that does this, look at the Apple I Replica.

The videopart has an ATMEL chip programmet to accept ASCII, and creates a NTSC screen image. You cannot position the text, but the text is just scrolled up on the screen, when new content is sent.

And if you want to do video overlay, the device you want is probably a "genlock". I've got a couple from back in my Amiga days. They generally used either software fade controls and/or hardware sliders. Most any TV station might have a couple old ones kicking around you might be able to get for begging or chump change.

buy a card I can plug into a socket on my motherboard? Also where can I get an ASCII enabled keyboard?

ULTIMATLY what I'm trying to do is make a computer... much similar to the Apple I or II, but I need one thing: somthing, mabey a card, or somthing simple I can include on the board of the system, which can take the ASCII code which is given to it by the processor via the Address/data bus, and turn that into the letters which is given to it in ASCII binary code on a TV/Video screen. Basicly I want to take an ASCII string in Binary, feed it to a chip or two, and be able to plug it into a VCR via composate video, and have it form the letters on the screen. I'm not intrested in doing anything graphic-wise, I just want to build a small, efficent 6502 Microcomputer with BASIC in the ROM, able to plug into a TV. Like the Apple II/I

This is exactly what you need then. The ATMEL package is small, relatively inexpensive, and fairly easy to program.