----- Original Message -----
From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
I was thinking
of something more like an FPGA demo board -- mine has
tons of gates, memory, PS2, VGA, the serial and parallel port are no
problem, etc.
Looking at an IOB6120, that's clearly no stretch (and the VHDL is
already in there for a VT52 w/PS/2 and VGA ;-)
Cool! I should go look at that :).
If an
additional terminal type is needed, it would be some ROM dumps
and VHDL tweaks.
As long as there's room for a bunch of ROM. I've seen raster
terminals with 68000s and a *lot* of 28-32-pin ROM chips.
Well, there's 16Mbit of flash and 256Mbit of SDRAM in mine.
(The PDP-8 is actually implemented with the 32Kx12 of block
RAM in the FPGA itself, and doesn't use any of that. Likewise,
it may be possible to represent some or all of a terminal's ROM
in the FPGA itself.)
Hey, if it can
do a PDP-8, it ought to be able to emulate a VT100 :-).
Entirely so. The question I have now is... what would it cost to make
one of these? If it's under $100, then will have a much larger
audience than if it costs $250. I spent quite a bit for an IOB6120
bag of parts, and I suppose that board as rigged to be a generic
classic terminal would already be cheaper than 2-3 real classic
terminals, but, as with anything non-essential, the cheaper you can
make it, the larger the potential audience.
Still... sounds like an interesting proposition to me.
Well, I think I paid about $200 for mine, but OTOH, it seems like it
would pretty much do the job, right out of the box. (Except for the
"small matter" of programming.)
Vince