> On 9 Oct 2018, at 14:08, Digby R.S. Tarvin <digby...@gmail.com> wrote:
<…> > So I don't think it i would be worth a substantial rewrite to get it going. > It is a shame that there don't seem to have been any more powerful machines > with a comparably elegant architecture and attractive front panel :) > > An attractive front panel for nearly any machine is just a soldering iron, > LEDs and some logic chips away. As far as elegant architectures, some are > very nice: MIPS is kind of retro but elegant, RISC-V is nice, 680x0 machines > can be had a reasonable prices, and POWER is kind of cool. I know I > shouldn't, but I have a soft spot for ARM. > > I have thought about it, but there are a couple of problems (in addition to > my lack artistic talent when it comes to building physically attractive > enclosures).. One is the sheer number of LEDs required to display all of the > address and data lines in a modern architecture. Mainly an issue if I want > to use the old PDP11/70 front panel that I had saved for the purpose, I > suppose. The other problem is getting access to the all of the machine state > that was displayable on a mini computer console. Virtual addresses, > User/Kernel mode, register contents etc are all hard to get at. I have toyed > with using JTAG etc, but there always seems to be something that I can't get > to. So it is hard to do more than resort to a software controlled front > panel. I used to have a little box of LEDs and switches that I plugged into > the parallel port on PCs, and had my BSDi kernel modified to update it as > part of the clock interrupt. But now the parallel ports are becoming rare and > you can't update LEDs connected via USB in a single instruction... :-/ Probably not quite what you’re after, but the PiDP8 and PiDP11 kits will get you an (arguably) attractive front panel without requiring artistic talent. http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11 I’ve not looked into how the front-panel is driven (from SIMH, I guess?), but perhaps it could be suitably massaged? d
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