PDP-8 Paper Tape Reader Emulator

With lots of help from members of this forum and other friends I made a high-speed paper tape reader emulator from a wire-wrapped interface board and an Emcraft SmartFusion FPGA evaluation board. The interface board plugs onto the Posibus interface slots in a PDP-8/L. I loaded Focal from a BIN paper tape image into a PDP-8/L in about 2 seconds. That equates to about 3000 characters per second. I put some details about the project here: https://sites.google.com/a/ricomputermuseum.org/home/Home/equipment/pdp-8-l… I will make an expanded version of the interface board and change to the Emcraft SOM FPGA board. That will give me enough I/O pins to emulate just about any peripheral that you can connect to the Posibus. It would be possible to make an interface board for the Negibus so that the peripheral emulator could be used on earlier PDP-8 systems. -- Michael Thompson