Perhaps you could do a core in an FPGA and grab whatever else you want: dram controllers, usb IO, video from here: www.opencores.org? The Alto would have done a lot of that in microcode ;-) Hmm, kinda similar to the 8-core Parallax Propellor in that regard.
I've been digging around the silicon structures project, Mead, Conway and many others at Parc. Here's a scheme-79 chip that was run on one of the first multi-project wafers. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6334/AIM-559.pdf?sequence=2 As that awesome article Ian referenced shows the Spartan-3 has logic/memory many times faster and larger than the Alto. By the way, a friend of mine bought one of these recently: http://www.silica.com/products/highlight/product/xilinx-spartan-6-lx9-microboard.html Xess stuff has keyboard mouse vga interface ports. Guess it depends where you wanna spend time hacking http://www.xess.com/prods/prod035.php I'm sure there are many more... Toby On 25 May 2011 18:20, Ian Piumarta <piuma...@speakeasy.net> wrote: > Dear Casey, > >> a) I want to play with software >> b) I want to play with FPGAs > > You could start with Thacker's 'Tiny Computer' (described from p.123 onwards > in http://piumarta.com/pov/points-of-view.pdf) and add/fix whatever you think > is missing/broken. > > Regards, > Ian > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
