emulating an Apple II+ in an FPGA

Brian Lanning wrote: Brian, I've got to subscribe -- sounds like a neat article. I recently subscribed to Nuts and Volts, and I like the fact that you get access to all of the back issues back to like 2004 for free included w/ your subscription. The whole retro-computing thing in an FPGA floats my boat. Very neat stuff. Lots of people have been reverse-engineering or duplicating the functionality of these old custom chips which is fantastic. Plus I love how it scales. Got two custom chips? 10 custom chips? The logic will fit into a small FPGA. And then throw the soft-core processor onto the same FPGA and you have the system-on-a-chip idea. And there's little wiring to do because everything is internal. As far as less time-consuming goes, I wouldn't count on it. I've had an FPGA board for awhile and there is a learning curve there. I've enjoyed the time I've spent on it, but like anything else, there is a fair bit of complexity if you hope to understand how everything works. The installed Xilinx(in my case) ISE software is huge, and requires a decent machine to give reasonable performance. The fact that many tools are separate programs, while (mostly) launched from the same place, leads to minor integration problems. Like tools that are command line only, and need 8.3 filenames. Or other tools that can't handle spaces in filenames (like "Documents and Settings", ie) And then there's documentation, which is mostly good, but BIIIIG. Like 600 pages for a memory controller. I'm not trying to sway your decision. Playing w/ this hardware is lots of fun --- just want to set your expectations accordingly. Keith