On Tuesday, July 29, 2014 12:58:58 PM UTC-5, monahanz wrote:
Comments please, in particular I would be interested in any other
similar modules.
Funny you should mention that, I am swamped at work and home and way behind in my board building (almost done with my 6x0x ECB board....) but I've been thinking of attaching an arduino mega to one of my S-100 prototyping boards and copying the discrete circuitry off the 6502 board for CPU switching, and then write some tight routines to emulate CPUs.
The mega has 52 I/O pins, so at the pin level conceptually I should be able to do nearly anything that once shipped on a 40 pin DIP, although perhaps slowly.
So much as you can switch to a 6502, you could switch to an arduino mega running a 1802 or PDP-8 or PDP-11 (dare I dream, 1620 or 1130?)
I'm under no illusion that an arduino emulation of a processor would run "pretty slow", but I'd rather have "pretty slow" than not at all.
On the I/O side I have a companion idea in my head to make the conceptual opposite board, a parallel port I/O board with the pinout for arduino addons, so I could plug in a relay board or any other arduino board (like, say, the wifi / ethernet / zigbee / bluetooth cheap COTS arduino boards). That's only slightly off topic. If I have to become an expert at the arduino bus interface, I may as well use it both "directions".
In my infinite spare time (says the guy who probably won't be able to pick up a soldering iron until September)