On Thu, Aug 8, 2024 at 11:16 AM John R. Hogerhuis <[email protected]> wrote:
> > A pico could certainly do everything a M100 workalike needs in a CPU, > probably even implement an 8085 instruction set. > > It's amazing how democratizing all this is... individual engineers can > make their own cases, compatible CPUs, good keyboards. Off the shelf > displays of needed proportion... > I love your vision, John. This might be a case where an FPGA would be useful — write your own hardware in software! There's a generic retro emulation system called MiSTer FPGA <https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki> (which would be overkill for this), but I'm surprised that I cannot find any mention of it being able to emulate a Model T! Maybe somebody needs to release an open core for the 8085A; I see there are some toy ones out there in Verilog and VHDL, but it looks like the real ones are still proprietary. For a sunlight visible display that is also low power, I hope someone makes a DIY laptop with an ePaper display. (Yes, it would be slow as molasses, but prices have come down a lot and it can be usable if you restrict the screen refreshes to a region.) —b9
