Comment by dlcarrier
12 hours ago
The title is a bit misleading; it's running on an 8088-compatible CPU, and a 1 megabyte SRAM, with the FPGA containing the display adapter and drive controller, as well as the glue logic.
12 hours ago
The title is a bit misleading; it's running on an 8088-compatible CPU, and a 1 megabyte SRAM, with the FPGA containing the display adapter and drive controller, as well as the glue logic.
A bit misleading, albeit in an impressive way. I nearly skipped the article thinking that it would be an all FPGA solution. Instead, they interfaced somewhat period correct chips: the V20 was used in XT compatibles of the era, the DAC was authentic (even if it is only a small part of the sound card), and the 1 MB RAM chip is the sort of cost cutting measure they would have used back in the day if it was available (though it would likely have been DRAM rather than SRAM). The rest being on an FPGA is certainly understandable since it was listed as an FPGA based project!
And the FPGA is a modern day equivalent to an ULA. If they could have put all of the chips in a single programmable one, they would.
Indeed, this should be more correctly described as an FPGA-Based IBM PC/XT Chipset.
In contrast, here's a whole 486-class PC compatible on an FPGA: https://github.com/alfikpl/ao486
This build demonstrate what’s actually interesting about FPGA to me. A pure implementation might as well be a software emulator. Being able to interface real chips makes this really neat.