Hi folks,
CPLD's are cheap and easy to program now days.
I suspect getting high speed 2901's and proms
for any micro-programed machine is tricky.
Over the past 6 to 9 months I've become rather intrigued about Lilith.
One of the great things about the design of MCode (the Lilith's stack-based bytecode)
is that it lends itself to being emulated directly by a Microcontroller, rather than
emulating the machine at a Microcode level (170ns / microinstruction).
My preliminary calculations imply that a low-end 60MHz ARM Microcontroller attached to
128k (or 256K of RAM) could emulate a Lilith in this way at full-speed even if it
didn't have a proper memory bus (i.e you access the RAM via I/O Ports).
I suspect 16bit addressing and data seems to be the
limiting
factor of this design.
The later Liliths accessed memory as 2 banks of 64KW => 256Kb in total.
>> But can one build the hardware from scratch?
>> None of this software emulation.
Well, I suppose the ARM version would be software emulation, but on the other hand,
it's a dedicated hardware / software combination and it'd probably give you a
Lilith for around $12!
... I wonder if MIT & India would be interested ;-)
-cheers from Julz @P