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Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

What makes the new version of this cool (for starters):

> The decision for a new processor was expedited by the possibility to implement it, that is, to make it concrete and available. This is due to the advent of programmable gate arrays (FPGA), allowing to turn a design into a real, functioning processor on a single chip. As a result, the described system can be realized using a low-cost development board. This board, Xilinx Spartan-3 by Digilent, features a 1-MByte static memory, which easily accommodates the entire Oberon System, incuding its compiler. It is shown, together with a display, a keyboard and a mouse in the photo below.

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But can't you only clock a design on a Spartan-3E at 300MHz maximum?

Given that Oberon was originally designed to run on a 10MHz CPU, that won't be much of a problem :)

Wow, such a small system, an ARM port would be nice.

The ARM family is the problem in that case. There's so much variation among the different versions that drivers are an issue. There is a version of the Oberon language, Astrobe, that runs on the a few of the smaller chips, created by CFB Software, but it's not a full operating system. http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

I can't offer a URL but I thought Wirth ported Oberon to some sort of ARM processor (in the last ten years or so) to control an RC airplane or some such.

If anyone cares about Oberon on ARM, look here, the linked articles with "Helicopter" in the title tell the tale:

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/index.html

I suppose one could email Dr. Wirth asking for the source code but in reality, you'd be better off forking a newer version of Oberon. It should be as easy to port as a compiler can be.

Wirth likes to design computer architectures to go with the languages he creates (he's got a EE undergrad). He did (at least) p-Machine & p-Code (Pascal virtual machine), Lilith (2901-based bit-slice graphical workstation implementing a Modula-2 virtual machine) and Ceres (a series of ns32000 based workstations running Oberon). He's been into FPGAs for a while. Smart guy.

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