On Monday, June 2, 2014 11:18:14 PM UTC-5, gek...@gmail.com wrote:
I'd vote for a tweak of the current board.
Personally I'd rather see efforts put into historically interesting CPU's - perhaps 6800, 6809, 1802, 8080A, SC/MP, 80186 or even PDP8 (6100/6120).
I'm in for Qty 2 6809 board and Qty 2 1802 board. I would greatly enjoy a S-100 '09 board. OS-9 (at least lvl1) on a S-100 bus, who ever would have thought... Perhaps after the ECB 6x0x boards are distributed and working.
A NS32008 or MC68008 ... interesting architectures and simple 8 bit bus and simple DIP packages.
If you're looking for really weird ideas, I'd like some emulated CPUs from the non-microcomputer era. Luckily some modern microcontrollers are fast enough to emulate some old CPUs at full speed. There are commercial shipping products using atmel micro controllers to emulate a 8080 CPU at original speed for example. And I'm in no hurry, so I'd be very happy with a "somewhat slow speed PDP11" rather than no PDP-11 at all. Obviously something like a IBM1620 could easily be emulated at full speed. Wouldn't that be interesting to have a 1620 on your desk, or an 1130 or a 7094? Or dare I ask, a 360? So if I could talk to Santa Claus I'd ask for a large PIC32 with the I/O connected to act as a (probably somewhat slow) bus master or bus slave CPU under emulation. Its an interesting intellectual challenge and people who dislike FPGAs for whatever reason have no complaint with a mere PIC32 microcontroller. If you have spare microcontroller I/O pins after interfacing to the S100 bus, hook them up to "something" and then people who don't want an emulated CPU but would like an ethernet adapter (or whatever other weird I/O device) can load up the software for the weird I/O device.