Subj : Re: what's classic now?
To   : Stan Hosdar
From : Jeff Thiele
Date : Thu Jul 01 2021 12:40 pm

Here's the current state of my PDP-8 FPGA project:
https://youtu.be/cfQxtfuVsAA

I've got the front panel and 4K RAM working. It can't execute any opcodes yet
(that's next!) but the front panel can be used to manipulate and view
registers and RAM.

The hardware is a Xilinx Spartan6-based development board with an IO shield on
top. Since the Spartan6 line is discontinued, these are fairly cheap boards
(as FPGA boards go); both together were about $100.

The board is a Chinese clone of the once-crowdfunded-but-now-obsolete Mojo
board and works with the Mojo IDE. The Mojo IDE requires a free version of
Xilinx ISE and allows use of either Verilog or Lucid (a hardware description
language peculiar to Alchitry Labs).

Alchitry Labs' current selection of FPGA development boards are the Cu, Au,
and Au+. They're more modern and capable than the Mojo, but more expensive.
However, projects should be fairly easy to move from the Mojo to these newer
boards if one desired and the IO shield for the newer boards is functionally
identical to the Mojo IO shield, but significantly smaller physically.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself
right.
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
 * Origin: Cold War Computing BBS (1:387/26)

.