Driving an eBay 640x480 LCD from a Digilent Basys 3. Built a breakout board to connect the 33 pin FFC cable to 3 PMOD connectors.

• LCD: ​VGA LCD or ​Datasheet

Another idea is to use a ​CMOD-A7. This has a 512Kx8 (asynchronous, easy-to-use) SRAM which is plenty for color video (12 bits at 640x480 for example). A pseudo-RAMDAC could trivially be implemented in the FPGA logic. A picoblaze could run the terminal logic.

Reproducing VGA modes (60Hz) (from ​blog

Mode	Pixels	Clock	RAM Adx (256 color)
640x480	370k	25.175 MHz	18
800x600	480k	40.000 MHz	18
1024x720	922k	74.250 MHz	20
1920x1080	2.1M	148.500 MHz	21

Not sure how it would look, but one could do 80x60 with an 8x8 character cell.