2 Nov
2005
2 Nov
'05
12:03 p.m.
On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 12:51 -0700, woodelf wrote:
Brian Wheeler wrote:
I don't know which model in particular we built...
As I recall, we were limited to 4K words. As for I/O, we had the
switches/leds and a serial terminal. The board we built them on had all
of the switches and LEDs mounted, but not wired up. The serial port was
also wired (1488/1489), but no connection to the area where we were
building the cpu. I hated that we couldn't take that home after the
class!
Since IOT was fully implemented, I suppose we could have built
peripherals as needed. The 2nd semester of the class was based around
the 6809. The projects then usually consisted of making a floppy
interface (along with driver changes for Flex) or
project-of-your-own-making. I build a memory pager which would let you
swap 1K chunks in and out of the address space to a bank of 256K.
Brian
I took a hardware class where we (each team of 2
students) had to build
a PDP-8 using PALs, some 74xx chips, a bit of Static RAM, and a ton of
wire wrapping. The final exam consisted of the instructor breaking each
machine in 5 different ways and we 3 hours to fix it. That was a pretty
cool class.
What type of 8 did you model and did you leave out any features like
extended memory?
I hear they use
FPGAs now in the class...kids these days.
I grumble that the FPGA's now days have built in hardware features that hide
real logic slowdowns like external memory or slow ripple carry.
Brian