A couple of things:
0. The physical quality of this build is out of the world good. PCB, plastics, switches, it's all amazing
1. The software as provided has a pretty old school build process (part of the charm?). I tightened up a bunch of it and dockerized it at https://github.com/mtrudel/pibox/tree/main/pidp11
2. I wish the build would have used something like an MCP23017 for IO instead of claiming so many RPi GPIOs. There's only a few (2-3 IIRC) GPIOs unused by the front panel, and the matrix LED/switch scan setup burns a ton of CPU