We really should be preserving old computers in HDL in a form as loyal as possible to the original. Then we could always reimplement them in FPGA and make "real" hardware cheaply enough until the sun burns out.
I was about to post this. In fact, I bet the resulting HDL code for this particular computer can be implemented in a technology that's cheaper than FPGA, like perhaps commercial flash PLD. Also things seem to be moving towards OpenCL which is behavioural and C-like, which may help people who are used to that paradigm, like people who do MCUs including the Raspberry Pi.
"A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears."
-- The League of Sadistic Telepaths
FPGAs (Score:4, Interesting)
We really should be preserving old computers in HDL in a form as loyal as possible to the original. Then we could always reimplement them in FPGA and make "real" hardware cheaply enough until the sun burns out.
It's doable, although these are big efforts.
There is already this Japanese guy who has done it for the SNES [at-ninja.jp].
Re: (Score:1)
I was about to post this. In fact, I bet the resulting HDL code for this particular computer can be implemented in a technology that's cheaper than FPGA, like perhaps commercial flash PLD. Also things seem to be moving towards OpenCL which is behavioural and C-like, which may help people who are used to that paradigm, like people who do MCUs including the Raspberry Pi.