An FPGA-based LGP-30 Replica

e-basteln.de

49 points·ofrzeta··8 comments

Cute project!

> Xilinx tech support page and a forum post explaining how to get the Xilinx ISE to run under Windows 8 or Windows 10. Unfortunately Xilinx no longer maintains this development suite, but has also considered it unnecessary to support their Spartan 6 platform in the successor software suite, Vivado…

Wasn't the Spartan 6 also supported by the open source toolchains? I just did a couple seconds of search and I could only find the yosys support, but no nextpnr. Sad. Xilinx/AMD should open that up

I haven't done it, but 7-series is theoretically supported by SymbiFlow tools[0], even though the bitstream generation still requires Xilinx's bitgen.

[0]https://github.com/symbiflow

My favourite computer... timing instruction placement on the drum. Juergen is actually planning to make a batch of kits later this year!

My late father was a maintenance technician for those things. He hated it when programmers did smart instruction placement to optimize drum timing. When the drum speed was a little off, they called him to calibrate it so their programs would run fast again.

That's impressive. It looks like the original LGP-30 computer should have made IBM jealous.

> Oscilloscope monitors internal activity.

Now that is downright romantic. What other computer offers entertainment like this?

For a serial computer, an oscilloscope will easily do what a set of blinking lights will do for a parallel computer. By trading time for space it gives you a free serial to parallel conversion.

But does Mel's blackjack program run on it? And does it cheat when you toggle the right switch?

Why FPGA instead of a software emulation that would be way more accessible?

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