Hardware vs Simh (and FPGA)

On Friday, April 26, 2013 23:46:52 ben wrote: DE1 has a somewhat smallish sram - 512Kb. Enough for most of DEC's operating systems, but limiting if you want to run 2.11BSD with the networking stuff and ethernet - I doubt if it will run at all. There's sdram on DE1 as well, but I'm having problems with it - probably I'm missing something. Or maybe my board is flawed - ehh, I doubt that is really the problem. sram is much easier to interface, that's certainly true. However, I learned that sdram is easy enough as well, as long as you are not trying for optimal bandwidth or using all banks simultaneously. The timing is still a lot more involved though. But then, you could also consider that any decent FPGA has internal srams - both the FPGA's on DE1 and DE0 have. Smaller, certainly - but, if you need a 4K sram, it's there. So it really comes down to what you need the memories for.